On Wednesday I took the afternoon off and headed to downtown San Jose to watch the finish of the Amgen Tour of California. I got there with plenty of time to spare, so I found a Mexican restaraunt across the street from city hall and had a torta. While I was sitting there eating lunch I noticed a guy sitting in front of city hall with some signs and it looked like he was protesting. I remembered reading about this guy going on hunger strike because he didn't like the name of some shopping center, and this was the guy. So after I finished my lunch I got a picutre of him along with some other seeminly random shots of the finish line scene. The festival that was setup around the finish line was ok. It was mostly the booths of sponsors and some other booths selling bike tires and t-shirts and stuff. Nothing really stuck out. After I'd had enough of walking around taking random pictures I decided to camp out roughly 100 meters from the finish line. That was about 1.5 hours before the first riders were to finish. The good thing about standing there waiting for 1.5 hours was that I could watch the jumbo-tron across the street showing the race going on. And I also spent most of the time talking to the guy next to me about the race. He was off from work all this week and was following the race and watching it in person every day. About 30 minutes before the first racers were to hit the finish line it really started filling up with people. I held on to the barrier that I was attached to and refused to move as people tried to nudge me aside to get up to the barrier too. It is funny how crowds work, after you've been to enough concerts and public events you just know someone is going to try to come along and move you out of your spot. But I held firm and didn't move an inch. If I was in someone's way that was too bad, I waited 1.5 hours to have a good view of the finish and I wasn't about to give that up. :-) We could tell that the racers were getting close when we saw the television helicopters approach. And sure enough, when Robert Gesink and Levi Leipheimer came around the last corner and streaked toward the finish everyone in the crowd went bananas. They flew by in the blink of an eye. Then about a minute later another group of riders flew by. And a little while after that a larger group came by. I don't know how fast they were going, but if you blinked you missed it. After most of the riders made it across the finish line the crowd moved over to the stage for the awards ceremony. I found a spot in the back and took a few photos and then walked a few blocks, jumped on light rail, and headed home. Overall it was pretty cool to see some of the top road bike racers in the world fly by. Next time I don't need to camp out by the finish line, being somewhere less crowded along the race route is fine with me. Oh yeah, I posted my photos here.