Tour of California Comes to Davis

We got back from a quick trip to Monterey to see birding friends from Massachusetts in time to catch the don’t-blink-you’ll-miss-it third stage of the Amgen Tour of California, running from Santa Rosa to Sacramento via Davis.

My optometrist’s shop is on 2nd street and I needed to get my glasses adjusted, so we opted to camp out at the finish of the 2nd Street intermediate sprint, which conveniently was right outside Mishka’s (ran into my co-trainee for Cold Canyon docenting, Iraj, and we had a good yak about how to cut a reed pen for calligraphy; Numenius’ boss and five of his labmates were across the street).

There’s a lot of waiting about for a race like this. The pink-dreadlocked lass in front of us has taken these days off as vacation and was following the tour as it sped through parts of California she’d never seen before: she coaxed me to the edge of the street as long as I didn’t get in the way of her digital camera. On Thursday, the race heads down Highway 1 past Big Sur, where we were yesterday, looking for condors. (Unsuccessfully.) That’s a long stretch of road to tie up with a bike race, but a thrilling race trajectory (too bad a storm’s coming in that day). My pink-haired friend was wondering whether she should get down there really early and wait for them along the cliffs, or see them off at the start…

The Davis sprint was exciting: a three-man breakaway had one guy clearly in the lead and about to take it when his green-clad rival snuck up behind him and took the sprint by about 12 feet.

We rode our bikes home, into the strong south wind, only to find that our landlord had plonked himself outside Baker’s Square to watch the race (about 300 yards up the road). He said all the waitresses came out to watch too, since there was nobody in the restaurant.

A great turnout for a workday: well done, Davis. After four days off, it’s back to the grind for me tomorrow…