Proud to be a Canadian!

Yesterday, Ed and I rode our bikes from Arras out to the Canadian National War Memorial at Vimy Ridge - should have been about 15 km but without a good map and with no help at the local tourist office other than "it's too busy, you can't ride out there on the main road" we rode 21+ km there over 90 minutes, but it was fun once we got out of Arras and into the country.

Very imposing memorial and solemn place ... the view to the north made it really clear why this was such an important accomplishment (the Canadians capturing the ridge in April 1917).

Ed tried last time we had internet access to upload some pics from London but no luck ... hopefully the next place we get to he can figure it out.

(and the last few entries had been sent to my blog via e-mail, which I've just discovered adds a wide variety of extra formatting characters that show up for some like gobbledegook. So, since I had a bit more time, I logged into Blogger to do this entry and will try to edit the others as I get time.)

As for the Tour, we ended up watching the Stage 1 finish on a bigscreen in St. James's park in London (near Buckingham Palace) which a was neat - all the British fans cheering when Millar took the polka dot King of the Mountains jersey, gasping when Cavendish crashed/changed bikes/seemed panicky, and cheered for McEwen's win ... Ed and I had given up on Robbie by that point, so even more than usual he came out of nowhere to win.

We checked into our hotel in Arras just in time to see the last 6 km of Stage 2, ie. big crash and Steegmans/Boonen 1 and 2. Good for Steegmans! Certainly looked like Boonen was trying and he told the French announcer "pas de cadeau" when asked.

And yesterday we got back in time to see the replays and hear the announcers go on and on about how "formidable" Cancellara was and "quel panache"!

To Paris tomorrow, my time is running out here now at this internet cafe.