November 6, 2009

Hi Joe: My wife and I are traveling to France in April and thought taking in at least one of the Spring Classics would be a good thing to do. Which race is the most spectator friendly and/or the coolest to experience.

Dave Fahrner - Santa Rosa, California

That sounds like a great idea, Dave. I highly recommend it.

Personally, I think that for the real Classics experience you should try and check out at least one of the three races of what I like to call The Classics Week. It all starts with the Ronde van Vlaanderen on April 4th - Easter Sunday. If you can only take in one event and are looking for the crazed Euro-fan, knock-down, drag-out bike race experience, this is the one to take in. The Ronde van Vlaanderen is admittedly not as much on the radar of American fans as Paris-Roubaix is, but most of us consider it to be the harder of the two. Also, without too much difficulty, you can check out at least a couple different sweet cobbled climbs without having to break too many laws. In fact, I have often talked about bringing a small group over for the Ronde and riding bikes from one cool viewing spot to the next.

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