The Tour de France begins tomorrow and will cover nearly 3,500 kilometers over the next three weeks. As was the case last year, Cycling the Alps has some great tools to show you all of the stages in the 2012 race.

Along with all of the great features from last year, they’ve added a few more:
• A stage dialog where you can load each single stage.
• Complete 3D tours of the prologue and all the 20 stages.
• Stage profiles.
They still have the overviews and games that were included last year, making this an excellent site for learning all about the Tour and the 20 stages it holds for the riders. Check it out for yourself at CyclingTheAlps.com.
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
3D tours require the Google Earth plug-in, so you do not see the full range of ‘mapped’ information as you tour, and the view does not follow every twist and turn of the route, so bits of some mountain stages are hidden. But you can zoom in and out of the tours and speed or slow them.
Looks like the best site available this year, best used in conjunction with the official Tour site.
I want to see if anybody has noticed that most of the USA street view coverage seems to be from a 1980s Polaroid Camera vs HD?
Will the USA ever get a quality HD update in the next 5 years?