‘Ride’ the Tour de France stages from your couch with Google Earth

I know, I know: I’m on a Tour de France kick, but it only comes once and year and it forces me to get on my bike more in the month of July than any other month of the year. Just got back from an early afternoon ride in fact, but before I left I found this news over at the Google Earth blog. Each stage of the race route is available as a KMZ file, which as we all know (not!) is a zipped keyhole markup language file for Google Earth. In understandable English that means you can open this file with Google Earth and literally fly in and zoom around the various TdF stages. It’s one thing to watch the long climbs and 50 mph+ decents on television, but it’s another to get a true view of the terrain. Enjoy!