Where's My Cowbell?

Greetings from Boulder!

I had decided not to do the Boulder Cup trip due to various factors that made staying home seem like the best thing to do. Tuesday night it was decided (with the help of one of the friends involved whose plans had also changed) that I was officially not going. Then the friend I would have been staying with called Wednesday morning and said she had figured a way to make it work out for her to stick around and go watch the races. So I did a mad scramble to get ready, staying up until 5am on Wednesday night trying to get everything done beforehand.... and here I am.

I didn't see bike racers milling around the airport tonight like I did in Providence, for example, two years ago. For nats there were bike boxes everywhere you looked. Today I only saw one. So either people are coming in tomorrow, they are driving in, or else they all live around here. Or a combination of the three. The start list is looking bigger and better than it did a couple of weeks ago. Just in the last few days I noticed some new names going up - names like Trebon and Troy Wells. I remember wondering the last time I looked why those two weren't on the list. There's gonna be a lotta good cowbell going on this weekend!

The weather is great - we walked down to Pearl St. for dinner and ended up at Juanita's. The chips were irrestible, and I tried a pomegranite margarita for the first time. I liked it, but am thinking I didn't love it.

Walking back from dinner, we saw a lot of people riding home along 13th from the Halloween Critical Mass ride. Their bikes were often all lit up and some were in good spirits - wearing fun costumes, calling out to us, and in one case blasting music from a trailer hooked up to a tandem. There is supposed to be a crazy Halloween party downtown tomorrow night. I hear it starts out as a party for the kids, but it supposedly morphs into something completely different.

If this great weather holds up, it should be ideal weather for spectating. It may disappoint the die hard mud and drizzle lovers, but I'll take 70's in November any day!

Darn, forgot my cowbell!

I guess I'll have to take some pictures instead.

I won't have time to do the WORS Banquet report this week - but I do want to say thank you to Gary of XTR Photo for taking the time to create two great collages of photos of the mtb team from the WORS series in 2008. He also put together a sweet slide show of various series riders which he showed at the banquet. He and Johnny are out there at every race taking pics of each racer, as well as trying to race themselves. Say thanks next time you see them, and maybe buy a pic or two. As Gary will tell you, they are doing it for the racers.