The Tour has crept up on me while it's been raining outside

Sometimes the Tour de France can't come soon enough. Sometimes it creeps up on you when you're not looking. This year it has felt like the later. One day it was mid-April and raining outside when without warning I looked up and noticed we were through the first week of June already ... and it was still raining outside. And now we're about to hit the final week of June and I've yet to catch my breath and notice that somewhere between now and winter there was spring. Time goes by when you're having fun. Time is what happens when you're busy making plans.

I've been having fun riding my bike and I've been busy planing various rides on Strava. I've been doing family things, watching baseball, monitoring Liverpool's transfer rumours and generally ignoring the world of professional cycling. That's not like me, at least in recent years. I mean, I do all the other things, but usually I'm still scrambling to find a dodgy feed of the Dauphine or Tour de Suisse. Not this year. Checking results of the Dauphine aside I all but ignored cycling this month. I didn't even know that Rohan Dennis had won in Switzerland until a few days ago. And only today have I checked to see that my boy Silvan Dillier won the Route du Sud. Oh and I see that Pierre Rolland won a stage down there. A sure bet for one at the Tour I reckon.

Sometimes you need the break, even if it isn't intentional. And because of it I'm starting get a slow build of excitement about the impending and sudden arrival of the Tour. Yes, that look up to see early June had become late June and the rain still falling, left me shocked to remember that Tour eve was only a week away.

It was walking into a shop and seeing a Tour preview magazine on the shelf that kicked me into focus again. And then seeing an article about team selections and the status of Mark Cavendish. And then the arrival in my unplayed list of the Cycling Podcast's Tour preview episode.

Time to tune in again to the cycling world. Time to look up the route map and stage profiles once more and remind myself of what to expect. Time to make a few bold predictions: Rohan Dennis for yellow on stage one; Sagan in yellow by stage five; Froome in yellow by Paris. I'll go do that now and try to report back in a few days time before it all kicks off on July 1.

Time to get excited.