I had the distinct priviledge of traveling through the reeeeal Springfield. As in, the reeeeal home of the Simpsons. But the only camera to be found was the one on my phone, which doesn’t offer much of a zoom, so the picture turned out to be pretty poor. D’oh!

ProTour cycling is rapidly flushing itself down the pooper. In the course of 2 days, you got Vino, then some schmoe Italian, and suddenly the “Stupid Chicken.” I’m speechless.

The quote of the day comes from Jesus Manzano - a former pro who doped himself silly in 2004. He says, “It won’t stop until all cyclists say, ‘Stop.’ No rider wins by eating plates of spaghetti.”

Well crap! I had delicious spaghetti and meatballs last night and ran about 7th today. I think another two plates would have put me right on the podium!

Stupid ProTour.

Between Nature Valley in Minneapolis, MN and the Cascade Classic in Bend, OR Mayo and I had the privilidge to make it up to Squirrel Island in Maine. This wasn’t an easy endeavor because it involved driving all the way across New England (including about 300 miles of upper New York) and then immediately back to western NY… at least for Mayo. I only had to go west to east, and not the return trip. This will be a picture diary of our trip to Maine.

It was fun as always to see the Splaines. Decia has since gotten a tattoo, as seen here. It’s very pretty.

While Mike was busy yaking, Maggie got to watch Ruth, Mayo, and me play Scrabble. I don’t fancy myself a great Scrabble player, but I certainly held my own this time around. The highlight of the game was when I used all 7 letters to spell “VALETING” thereby giving me a smokin’ 72 points. I came out on top, as seen here.Clearly Maggie is impressed.

That night we also made ice cream with one of those crazy ice cream maker balls. In theory, this is an awesome invention to keep kids occupied in the summer. In practice, though, it’s a fairly complicated procedure that can’t be done by the camp fire, as they might lead you to believe. Our chocolate, coconut, chocolate chip ice cream was rather tasty all the same.

Boating in the fog and rain. Yeehaw!

And to top it all off, there’s nothing finer than cocktail hour with great friends. Here are the Lescures, Ballantines, Splaines (x2 generations), and Teddy and Mayo hidden behind the camera.

So after Squirrel it was back to work in Oregon for me. We’re finished with that after a successful week with Robbie, Brian, and Tom making their respective comebacks all at the same time, and now have Tour de Toona on the horizon! Busy busy busy.

A funny thing happened to me today in today’s Cascade Classic bike race. It wasn’t Ha Ha funny, it was more Oh $%!# funny…

So there I was climbing the 6 miles up to the finish of a hot 80 mile road race. I heard something go clunking down the road and didn’t think much of it until 10 seconds later when I glanced down at my handlebars and noticed my GPS was missing! After finishing the stage (which BJM won!) we descended the climb heading back to Bend and sadly found the remnents. After counting how many pieces are missing and looking at the damage, I’m estimating that half of the race caravan ran it over.

(For those out of the loop, GPS’s are the latest in cycling computer technology. Rather than using magnets and counting revolutions of a bike wheel, they use satalites to calculate speed, distance, elevation, etc. They’re about 1/2 the size of an iPod and clip to one’s handlebars… unless they mysteriously unclip and bounce down the road. Sad. )

Much like Robbie noted in his last update, my lack of posts is not due to the fact that nothing eventful occurred in the month of June, it’s more that nothing worth updating occurred in the month of June. I suppose that everything is going to be somewhat less news worthy when the previous post is about riding with Lance “I’m the man” Armstrong.

One highlight, however, was when Scott was nearly arrested for walking around without pants at our host house in Minnesota. We stayed in the dapper lap of luxury with Doug and Marcia for Nature Valley Grand Prix. One morning, Scott went outside to get something from the team car parked in the driveway. The rest of the guys were slogging around the kitchen in the midst of our morning routine when we hear over a loud speaker, “Step away from the vehicle and put your hands where I can see them!” We all sprinted to the windows to take a peek and notice that the cop was directing his orders to our poor, pantless teammate. It turns out that an security alarm was going off in our neighbor’s house, which is why the police man was summoned, but it’s still really funny to look at this picture I scored of Scott and his inward-pointing feet. He looks very bird like.

In other news, I was featured on the cover of the critically acclaimed Michigan Sports and Fitness Magazine. Being that our team is based in Michigan, I scored this glamorous cover shot from the Tour of California prologue. What a ferocious face I’ve got on, eh. I’ll be doing an autograph signing session sometime in the upcoming month. I hear all sorts of Michigan celebrities and people of high political office will be coming out for the occasion. I think I’ll also be able to secure a Sharpie permenant marker sponsorship out of it.

The good news of the week is that Robbie was healthy enough to finish up the 4 day Fitchburg-Longsjo bike race in central Massachusetts. That’s earned him a starting spot out in Cascade which runs July 11-16. Fitchburg marks his first completed stage race in about three months since his surgery. Good things.