By Phil Gaimon

Waking up, my first guess was that someone was at the wrong hotel room, or perhaps a teammate was playing a joke on me.

“Go away!” I groaned, still asleep. “Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s USADA.”

Oh. “Let me find some pants.”

Most of my teammates were already in the testing room. We were told that the UCI was blood-testing every rider at the race for the anti-doping passport program. Jelly Belly pulled the short straw and got picked first.

That was the first indicator that this is a big race. The second was directing Mark Cavendish to the breakfast room, and the third was realizing that it was Tom Boonen’s cloud of cologne I was walking through.

We arrived at the race hotel in Sacramento yesterday, after touring the Jelly Belly Candy Factory in Fairfield. It’s important that we know the products and history of our title sponsor, so we got an insider’s look at how they make jelly beans, sampling them at each stage of the process. They made me wear a moustache net.

Some interesting factoids we learned:

-Each jellybean takes 7-21 days to be made (depending on the flavor).
-Jelly Belly has been around for more than 100 years, but the company’s biggest growth took place after Ronald Reagan (who ate Jelly Beans to kick his smoking habit) was elected president. Jelly Belly shipped several tons of beans to the inauguration, and he kept a jar on his desk at all times: red, white and blue.
-Jelly Belly makes 50 flavors, but the mixed bag contains only 49. This is because they use all real ingredients (it’s the gourmet jelly bean), and you don’t want the oil from the Jalapeno flavor to get all over the other beans.

In other news, rain and snow is expected next week. All week. I’m trying not to think about it. That’s all for now from Sacramento.