Getting close to the action

Today's Giro stage has 12 kilometres to go and for us it isn't the middle of the night! Unfortunately we're only watching it on TV but it's better than staying up. It seems a lot has happened since my last post. We saw quite a lot of the Italian countryside getting here - countryside that we hadn't planned to see, but one wrong turn that takes you onto a motorway without exits will do that! Still, no harm done. Yesterday afternoon was all about getting the bikes together. Fortunately we have a decent sized room by European standards, so there was room to spread out. Haven't worked out how to upload photos to the blog from the iPad so I can't show the photographic evidence yet. Today we rode out to the course for tomorrow's Piacenza Para-cycling road races. It is flat and quite exposed in places so if there's any wind at all, positioning will be crucial. There were many cyclists out on the course, competing for space with the teams of workmen making repairs to the road where it was badly chopped up from local traffic. And back to the Giro, we've just witnessed another clinical display by Mark Cavendish - even boxed in and checked a couple of hundred metres out, he still made it look easy! So, tomorrow the "real" racing is on. Jing's race starts at 11.00am and is 6 laps totalling almost 56km. Stay tuned for results in about 24 hours.