Tour of Britain('s Odd Landmarks)

Good news for all our readers in the North of England. The Tour of Britain is kicking off in Rochdale tomorrow. Overall this will give much of Britain the chance to see some of the best road cyclists in the world for a fraction of a second as they zip past.

Given the nature of watching a cycle race on the roads, which can often be a long wait followed by moments of excitement and then half an hour of trying to work out who was who, and wondering who is going to actually win the stage when there’s no way you’re really going to make it to the finish in time to see, I would suggest taking one of two options.

One option is to watch it at home on the telly, where you can not only see the entire race unfold as motorbikes and helicopters take the strain, but also will stay lovely and dry when the inevitable September rain (the shorter and warmer version of the Guns ‘n’ Roses classic) comes during your roadside wait. The second one is to make sure you go somewhere interesting to watch the race, so that the flash of cyclists passing is a minor part of your exciting day. The ToB website can help with this and FMFT’s pick for your location on tomorrow’s stage is BT’s 100000th payphone. Who could resist the thrill of an historically important phonebox as a day out. For all we know it might be one of those fancy ones with internet access and you’ll be able to work out how the race is unfolding as well.

Obviously as we don’t put anything on this blog over the Weekend you’ll need suggestions for Sunday and Monday’s stages as well. For Sunday the racing is around Stoke on Trent, and we were tempted to suggest the exciting site of the 1986 National Garden Festival, until we saw that it’s now a shopping centre. Our pick is therefore the JCB factory in Rocester, where if we were you we’d have a factory tour and breakfast and make it to the roadside just in time for the bicycles (or “borrow” a digger and create a typically rural British obstacle for the race in terms of a traffic jam).

On Monday the Tour will be heading into Wales (and we won’t get anything published in time). Our suggestion has to be to combine it with some mountain biking, and actually we’re quite jealous. After the finish in Swansea go and shiver on the beach, or check out the thrilling nightlife that FMFT were able to take a bite of recently.

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