The Vuelta and a Ring Around the Sun

One of the (many) things that just irritates the living snot out of me is the fact that NBCSN is only televising the Tour de France.  Of the three grand tours, it is by FAR the most boring.  Sky racing and their big fat budget gets a lead, controls the pace and it becomes a parade.  I think the Vuelta a Espana is the best race.  Anyway, we had to sign up for live and on demand coverage streaming on NBCSN.  Forty dollars for a year.  Phil and Paul are not narrating, it’s a couple of Australians and they’re about as exciting as a bucket of warm spit. Sound quality is really terrible, it’s up and down, and the Aussies have a habit of swallowing their words. Even the camera work is bad.  OK, enough complaining.

I have to laugh at us.  Roku, Chromecast, Firestick or Fire whatever are meaningless words to us.  So, I called my friend Kim and asked her to tell me, speaking slowly, using words of one syllable, how do I get what’s on the laptop on to the television.  HDMI cable!  Since we’re on DSL until we leave here, we don’t have to worry about exceeding our data caps with Verizon.

We’ve made ourselves a major trip hazard, but at least we can both see it at the same time without huddling around the laptop.



Today we did a short ride out in the Carnation Valley.  It’s a safe place to ride, so we’ve been going there instead of riding with the cars.  Jim does not need to crash at this stage of things.  There was a pretty good ring around the sun.



Here is Jim, at our turn around point.



Tomorrow we will have to use our pin hole eclipse viewer.  We were unable to procure the glasses, so we bought a giant box of corn flakes to make the viewer.  I will stand by to be amazed if this actually shows us anything.