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Tour de France kicked off this morning. Now I have something worth watching on TV each evening for the next 3 weeks!

I put in 53 miles this morning on my circa 2012 Pinarello FP3 with a brand new Campagnolo Record 12 groupset. A bit toasty and humid here in the Carolinas today, with some early haze due to the Canadian fires. Glad to get it done before noon!

"...I put in 53 miles this morning on my circa 2012 Pinarello FP3 with a brand new Campagnolo Record 12 groupset...."

Pinarello just got bought by South African mininig billionaire Ivan Glasenberg. Fausto Pinarello keeps a stake and I suspect will keep a hand in running the company.

I'm on 12-sp Chorus derailleurs (can't justify the Record mark-up any more) but with Dura-Ace rim brakes ('cuz they're better & cheaper'n Campy's).

I rode 8-sp until Campy stopped making repair parts for the brifters, then went to 10-sp, ... until they stopped making 10-sp repair parts (and Branford Bike ran out of NOS). And they're not making repair parts for 12-sp at all so when the right-hand brifter wears out, the only option is throw it away and buy another. I won't cry as hard over throwing out a repairable Chorus brifter as hard as I would a Record one.

One of these days I might get fed up and go back to friction shifters. A friction shifter don't know how many cogs is in the back.

If you didn't hear, there was a rider killed in this year's Tour de Suisse. Swiss racer Gino Mäder and another rider ran wide of a turn in a high-speed descent (60+ mph) and the embankment was steep enough that Mäder died from his injuries and the other rider was injured badly enough to require hospitalization. Apparently there wasn't so much as a cell phone camera covering the accident so no one knows exactly what happened but it was a steep enough shoulder that they might have gone airborne.

First cyclist killed in a race since Fabio Casartelli in the '95 TdF, who crashed into a 10-ton stone bollard the French were using to impersonate a guard rail.