Notes:  (latest notes always appear at the top)

- Tuesday's Tour of California Stage 3 departs San José at 12pm PST (3pm U.S. Eastern or 21:00 CET).  The Tour Tracker live coverage should begin at around that time.  Tour of California live webcast on cycling.tv is scheduled to begin at 4:30pm U.S. Eastern (22:30 CET).  Live coverage on Eurosport will happen if the coin turns up heads and time permitting pending the completion of the grasshopper world's tiddly winks competition, otherwise there will be no live coverage.

2009 Tour of California:  Carlos Rico, seen here at the Golden Gate Bridge early this morning, is part of the cyclingfans.com team on site at the race all week.  Carlos assists his wife, photographer Laura Alber, with carrying photography gear and in getting to the best possible locations for shooting.  And if that weren't enough, Carlos is fluent in English, Spanish and Italian, kind of handy in the world of professional cycling!  Great work guys.  We need more races in the U.S.! -Pete

- About 50 minutes ago:  "We just crossed the summit.  Pouring rain and hydroplaning!   Traffic at a stand-still coming toward the Pacific Ocean." -Laura Alber

- Laura just called again:  "You have what you need."  Carlos continues driving while Laura transfers photos.  So I'm downloading Golden Gate Bridge pics now.  Gotta love technology.  (When it works, of course.)  But the technology is nothing without a great, dedicated, talented team like Laura and Carlos....with a great sense of humor.  Did I mention that the other day Laura grabbed a Team Cervelo directeur sportif's rental car contract and fuel card and held them for ransom?  Team soigneur Igor traded them some team musettes and bottles in exchange for the documents.  Hilarious.  As Laura said, "The tifosi are dancing in the streets of Sacramento."  And wreaking havoc.  Gotta love it.  -Pete

- Photographer Laura Alber just called from the road.  Wireless modem connection slow today, so decision was made for them to abort the image transfer and continue to Santa Cruz for the race finish; we'll have photos of the peloton on the Golden Gate Bridge later.

- Live coverage summary:  At the moment, the race is playing on cycling.tv, the Tour Tracker and the tickers, all listed in gray section at right.  Eurosport is broadcasting WTA tennis at this time.

- Our photographer with the race Laura Alber just reported in from the road.  We should have pics of the peloton going over the Golden Gate bridge in a bit.

- Below, we've listed a couple of video clips from this morning's stage start in Sausalito.

2009 Tour of California:  An exhausted Carlos Rico and Laura Alber fell asleep wearing their media credentials.  Very funny, you two!

- If you are joining us for the first time, we cover pro racing all season long, getting to many races ourselves (mostly in Europe but increasingly in the U.S. as well), and making it easy for cycling fans worldwide to follow and watch all the big races, and many small races, online.  Pro riders and members of the media also regularly visit cyclingfans.com.  One pro team representative suggested the following to me as a tagline after riders kept telling him about cyclingfans.com: "The site even the pros turn to for live race coverage."  We're in our 5th year of doing this and have come a long way since this started out as my photo blog.  We are in our second year of working with the award-winning and renowned cycling Fotoreporter Sirotti and with the Tour of California we've added the fantastic photo team of Laura Alber and Carlos Rico (fluent in English, Spanish, Italian) who seem to be having a blast despite the lousy weather.  -Pete

- Took a little while to connect to the Tour Tracker.  Peloton is now on the Golden Gate Bridge.  Our photo team, Laura Alber and Carlos Rico, is also on the bridge.  Shame the weather is so lousy.  If they get a good connection, we hope to have photos before they continue on toward the finish.

- We recommend you open our Twitter feed in a separate window now.  If ever we have a server outage, we will update on Twitter and direct you to a live coverage page on another server.

- Today's Tour of California Stage 2 starts at 8:30am PST (11:30am U.S. Eastern, 17:30 CET).  The Tour Tracker live coverage should begin at about that time.  Tour of California live video of Stage 2 starts on cycling.tv at 9am local time (12pm U.S. Eastern and 18:00 CET).  Tour of California live coverage on Eurosport is scheduled to begin at 18:30 CET (12:30pm U.S. Eastern).  Live TV coverage on Versus in the U.S. is scheduled to begin at 12:30pm Eastern.

- Welcome to our live coverage guide for the 2009 Tour of California.