Tour of Britain: The First Stage

London - First, let me say I'm glad that I don't have the cold that our photographer, Paul McKelvey, has come down with recently. He's coughing and wheezing his way around England. And that makes him the plague as far as the riders are concerned. If they get sick, it's all over for them. So I might have to get him a surgical mask to wear.

Today's opening stage of the race went fairly well. Rock Racing placed a rider in the top five and no one crashed or lost time. Media interviews went fairly smoothly, too.

I don't particularly prefer to be in the spotlight when it comes to working for the team, but I will point you to a complimentary story mentioning me at today's race.

By the way, if you don't know about Twitter (mentioned in the story), it's a way to receive short message updates. Cousin Barb is a Twitter fiend. Check out the Rock Racing Twitter feed here (you don't have to sign up for anything by clicking on it.).

As for the slideshow above, here are a few details (girls, pay attention, there might be a quiz):

- Because our media shuttle could only travel 60 mph, the police escort we had left us in the dust. This made us arrive in London much later than we had anticipated.

- More than 100,000 people lined the five-mile route at today's race that passed by Big Ben, the House of Parliment and hugged the River Thames. (Lauren, I did not see the hospital that's in your book. Sorry!)

- Finding a Catholic church - with a mass at a time I could attend - proved to be an impossibility. So I did the only thing I could think of to make up for it: watched a 48-minute (singing) mass on Youtube.com. This had better not happen again next week.

- My dinner partners enjoyed a meal at a place called "World Giraffe" that had the world's largest collection of child seats. The funny part was that there were no children there - and only three other customers.

- The elevator in our hotel (or "lift" as they refer to it here) stopped working yesterday. So I'm going to spend tomorrow morning helping move baggage and equipment from the third floor out to the cars.

- There's a large motor coach that serves as the press room for the race (sorry, no picture yet). That's where the restroom photo came from in the slideshow.

- I hope few motorists noticed when our bus stopped on the way back to the hotel (a two-hour drive) and the U.S. Criterium Champion relieved himself by the side of the road. (Not a PR person's best situation.)

- Fortunately it did not rain on today's stage. But we are bracing for some route changes later in the week due to severe flooding.

- When we returned to the hotel from dinner at 10:30 p.m., U.S. Open tennis was on the TV in the lobby. I don't know if it was live.

- I am quickly learning to pretty much double the price of an item to determine its "real" cost. In other words, something that costs 4.5 pounds (the English currency) is nearly $9 in U.S. currency. So while everything seems relatively inexpensive, it's not.

Finally, a few photos from Paul at Vero Image. He's always kidding me about my camera phone. I don't know - do his pictures really look better than the ones in the slideshow above? *GRINS*

Our motorcycle escort ... before it left us.

Tyler Hamilton and a familiar-looking guy walking to his left.

A great shot of the scrum of media and fans I deal with daily.

Those commemorative bikes cost more than my car.