Tour de Yorkshire 2016

TheGirl has had a great day today! She did a wonderful piece of writing when she got up, she spent 90 minutes practising her music. We cycled to school. As we left our house, we immediately found ourselves surrounded by the support cars for the Tour de Yorkshire - our house is opposite where they park. We cycled down part of the warm up route. We cycled part of the actual route. I took her to school. 

She was at school for about 90 minutes before they released the pupils (to authorised adults!) to go see the Grande Departe. It was jolly freezing, bless them. I joined her about 45 minutes later, managing to get out of work for a while. We saw the teams do their platform appearances, we waved at lots of mascots/characters, we got the kids free flags, we watched the pelaton begin to form up for their parade lap of the town. We then took a side street to where I knew would be a bit quieter and managed to get a fab vantage point for the next passing of the full pre-peloton children's riders, the huge police entourage, the peloton and then the support vehicles! So much for what was no more than 5 seconds of race bikes passing us!! I was heading back to work, but Emma had parked at our house as we were at the end of our street where we watched from so Katie got to run inside to cuddle Monkey before she went back to Emma's for an hour until they had to go back to school. 

She only did an hour's afternoon school before it was time for orchestra! She came out of school a happy girl with what she'd done with her day- apart from "we had to do handwriting practise. I had to write S and s. And Tuesday". I was pretty mad. I had been assured she wouldn't be made to do handwriting practise as she has stunning cursive writing. Sigh. 

After school we had our little friend with us again. Katie cycled home and we stopped at the town centre on the way - she wanted to watch some more of the race on the giant screen that was still displayed. She liked that first was Brit and honorary Yorkshireman Pete Williams and that she got to see actual Yorkshireman Josh Edmondson break away from the pack to hit 3rd place. 

The kids had an early tea, a really long bath and the baby was asleep by 6.20. Katie was only about 20 minutes after her!