The peloton rode north out of Leeds in a neutralised procession before lining up once again for the official start of the stage to Harrogate.
That rather went out of the window yesterday, as Mark Cavendish – one of the finest athletes this country has to offer, and also one of just four home riders on the start line in Leeds – skittered into Simon Gerrans and hit the deck in Harrogate with his mum watching on.
My fellow Liberal Democrat blogger James Graham complains that the policy on faith schools that the party adopted in Harrogate at the weekend is "a messy compromise".
It was York, Harrogate, the upland moors and the lowland dales.
But they forgive these smaller issues for the bigger picture; as I greet them they are thumbing through the Wetherspoon magazine, admiring the opulence of Harrogate Wetherspoon, the Winter Gardens, housed in a former Royal Bath building.
Whereas the route of last year's Tour de France was marked by yellow bicycles and bunting made from knitted yellow jerseys (22,000 in the Harrogate area alone), blue and yellow bicycles mark the Tour de Yorkshire route.
Buttertubs, of course, is the glorious climb out of Hawes in North Yorkshire and down into Swaledale, while Blubberhouses is a village by a hill between Harrogate and Bolton Abbey on the busy Skipton Road.
The most modest would cut £1.2 billion from the annual £5.4 billion energy bill for the region, which has a population of 3,000,000 and includes Barnsley, Bradford, Calderdale, Craven, Harrogate, Kirklees, Leeds, Selby, Wakefield and York.
Updated at 12.20pm BST Facebook Twitter Google plus Share Share this post Facebook Twitter Google plus close 12.04pm BST12 04 The breakaway have reached Harrogate, which gets a second taste of Tour action after yesterday's dramatic finish.
At the press viewing this morning, a van from a tea merchant in Harrogate was distributing free cups of Yorkshire tea in the academy's courtyard.Yet here is an odd thing.
There is an academic one between London, Cambridge and Oxford and a posh one, loved by estate agents, between Leeds, York and Harrogate.
