How was the TT stage Vonhelmet? Did you find a decent spot and have a trouble-free ride in?
It was good, yeah. We took the most insane route there. Considering Knowsley is sort of West-South-West of where I live, I should have been concerned when the guy calling the shots started out by taking us North. What could have been a 17.5 mile ride there turned into nearly 30 miles. Ordinarily that wouldn't be a problem, but the rain was absolutely heaving down. We were all absolutely wet through. His route also didn't appear to account for hills, so what could have been a fairly flat run down to Prescot took in a couple of fairly stiff climbs. At one point we got lost and went round in a big square, with the leaders about to head back the way we'd come a few minutes earlier. Fortunately I managed to shout at everyone to stop and I dug my phone out and figured out where we were! Then one guy got a puncture and we had to stop in the rain to fix that... Oh, fun and games.
We got there just after 12, so we only missed a handful of riders. Mercifully it wasn't raining much by then. Everyone had mocked me for bringing an umbrella in my jersey pocket, but one of the guys who races and has no fat on him borrowed it and was glad of it! We watched from by the hairpin near the start - the route went up from the safari park to a roundabout, then went a hundred metres or so beyond the roundabout before doubling back on itself and heading back to the same roundabout and heading off. It was quite a good spot as it meant you could see the rider coming, see their car with the name of who they were, and then see them coming back the other way from the hairpin turn. We saw all the big names and cheered them on. I got a few pics, but nothing special as I was only using my phone.
We left after Wiggins, so missed the last ten riders, but I swear we were all so cold and fed up from the ride in that we just wanted to get somewhere warm! We went to a pub nearby for some lunch and watched the remaining riders coming in. We'd been joking about being in Liverpool and having to watch our bikes, and one of our guys got talking to a chap in the pub about how much our bikes were worth, with him saying he had some "colleagues" who'd come and sort them out and we could pick them up from Widnes market...
We cycled home by a much more direct route after all that! It was still raining but not nearly as much.
So, fun, but exceedingly wet!
