Duh 2018 Tour duh Charlotte

As before, I am a cog in the Tour duh Charlotte machine.  Here's my cog's view of the 2018 Edition.

I'm standing just inside the woods, waiting for the first racers to enter the trail on Stage 2 of the Tour duh Charlotte.  The one that I'm in charge of for the day.  The one that after the Swamp Stage got destroyed by the city, and after the team decided to cut the Tour from five stages to four, Lee and I kinda pushed the team into adding back to the schedule.  We've always planned five, and one has always gotten cut during the last week for some reason or another... I really wanted to make this happen.

So there I am, looking for the riders.  They're not where I'm expecting them or when.  I see party pace spectators pointing at a ball field in the distance... there are the racers just wandering around aimlessly.  Yelling.  They never made it to the trail.  I panic.

Then I wake up.  Look at the clock.  4:00AM.  The Tour doesn't start for another six hours.  Meh.

That's how stressed out about the Tour I let myself get.

Evenutally, I fall back asleep and then the alarm goes off at 6:00AM.  Quick breakfast and I ride to Triple C Brewing.  Do what I do best at sign-in.  Run around worrying about a hundred things because I can only think about what could go wrong and less about all that's going right.  Do a few useful things, at some point, slice my thumb open because I'm in too much of a hurry...

10:00AM.  We roll out on time.

Do my share of corking the intersections, and because the route went right by my house, I rolled up to my porch and loaded my bag down with a bunch of Stone beer (glad I hadn't carried it around all morning).  Yeth, as fate would have it, the Tour actually rolled right past the houses of four of us that had been heavily involved in making TdC happen this year.  Not by design, but strange coincidence.

Anyways, get to the first stage behind an elementary school.  It all goes relatively smooth, except for maybe the principal who just showed up and had mixed feelings of good and bad regarding our event.  "Permission... something something... glad to see these trails get revived and used... but permission... something."

Viva duh.

I have to cut out early with Stage 2 and 3 volunteers and coordinators.  Gotta go mark our courses and what not.  Mine is pretty easy to set up with the help of Big 'n Buttery, so we head over to Stage 3 to help... and see that the stream crossing we built a few weeks ago with a million tiny rocks has washed away... so we hastily rebuild.  Then kick back, enjoy a beer, wait for the arrival of the peloton.

I don't think most of the people realized that the route went ass to elbow back to slightly above the ass.  We decided to keep the loop down to the canceled stage sort of intact, because that scabby network was the true flavor of a Tour route.

You're welcome?  Apologies for the MS Paint recreation tho.

Eventually, the racers come, I get them started, and they didn't end up wandering around in the ball fields.

I do my job of sweeping the course, which was as thrilling as it sounds.

Weldon was shy about letting me have that semi-blurred image since I was the last one through and he wasn't entirely set to take the shot.  I told him it was necessary for my validation.  All the Tour duh Charlotte shots actually worth seeing are right here.

I halp set up the Stage 3 start and then headed to spectate the half-assed creek crossing we just rebuilt.  Worth it.

Over to lunch, and I finally get to do the other things that (I think) I'm good at.

Yell at people and get them moving.

We'd already had a slight drizzle and sleet, and I was super motivated to keep the show on the road.  We were going to have to cut the final stage if we didn't keep moving.

So yes, I yelled at people and told them to eat pizza and drink beer like their lives depended on it.

photo cred: Cam

Sorry not sorry.  I wanted a five stage tour pretty badly.
 
Move our people and Stage 4 goes off and no rain and almost no one gets hurt.

Except Dubuc but says he's okay (still as of today).

We get over to Stage 5 and it goes off without a hitch (AFAIK).

Everyone rolls out and then I have to pee so I stop and do that and when I look up everyone is gone and although I know how to get outta the woods I'm not sure which way the group was going so I bee-line out and along the way I run into a group of about eight who also somehow got separated and together we rode the way I thought mebbe we'd catch up to the group...

And we popped out on the light rail path just slightly ahead of the main group.  Wait.  Join.  Buenos.

Back at the brewery, City Barbeque, beer... good times. Until there were about only eight of us left and the beer tokens were gone (or left in the corners of our pockets or recesses of our bags).

More tomorrow... or the next day.  Dunno.