Sacto to Grass Valley

The day before the day is always nice. Nothing too pressing to do, lots of sorting and adjusting...

We have three Ford vans, and two F-250s. Sounds good enough, but when you load them down with eight days worth of signs, sign stands,  and sandbags, (and other assorted crap) you end up hoping for about 100 more horsepower. Sadly, it never arrives.

And these vans. The high-water mark must have been when Dodge sponsored the Tour de Georgia and the  advance trucks were Sprinters, and they were just fantastic. The switch to panel vans came the next year when Dodge dropped their sponsorship. It's never been the same.

This year (and they tell me in years past) there are three vans. The main Routing van is piloted by Rob and assisted by Sabra; the secondary van (and my previous post) is piloted by Mark with Terry riding shotgun. These two vans set out 4 (if you're lucky) hours before the race starts to set out all the course arrows and UCI mandated technical signs. This is really glam work.

The wrinkle is in the third van. This van's first priority is picking up the traffic advisory signs that have been out for a long while alerting the local driving populace to the fact that on race day, there are going to be delays. Sadly, I'm guessing that we're going to have people complaining about delays; signs seem to do no good.

The final truck (*This year* we have two) is a pickup (two, due to the fact that the race organizer could not unfuck themselves enough to rent a full-sized bed pickup truck) these guys are tasked with picking up all the signs that the first two vans put up. This year, due to the error, we have two pickups--short bed. This means that I lost my navigator to the two pick up crew and my man Keith joins Steve and Steve in the sweep crew.

I know we're all looking forward to the early (*7am--not early) start tomorrow!