Originally Posted by
furiousferret
I saw some drums at the Hilton, the Cruise Dinner, Pre Race, and a few other places, not sure if there was a specific one at the race I missed. Pre race I was forced to dance with one of the Tahitian ladies!
The Venice trip looks really nice, most of the Santana ones do. I'm not sure if we'll do another one, but they're tempting, especially the (spoiler alert) Australia / Tasmania one. As a couple still working, we only get one cool vacation a year and its a tight competition! My wife also gets free flights (points) to Costa Rica and Hawaii which we have yet to take advantage of.
Still a lot of people ask why go somewhere to just ride a bike, and imo if you're going to a place to see the countryside, there's no better way to do it.
The dance before the race probably cost you making the selection on the kilo power climb.
We have done several Santana tours and we have a love hate relationship with them. We finish one and decide it was fun but probably not do another one. Then we see a trip that is really interesting that we would be unable to do any other way for the value provided that includes cycling and boom. We sign up for another one.
My wife and I were discussing yesterday how tours do not make us stronger / faster. We get a lot of training stress and ahem, endurance but not speed. Training camps that generate a lot of fatigue seem to work and bump fitness. The only real training day we had on Tahiti, besides the race, was we rode around Moorea non stop tempo.