Games making

With just hours remaining before Danny Boyle's opening ceremony takes place, I'm going to continue to #savethesurprise having attended Monday evening's first dress rehearsal in the stadium at Stratford. Of course, those going to the real thing tonight will know - as we all do if we've been following the news - that sheep and fireworks are involved, plus a certain amount of bouncing on beds . But plenty of nice surprises await, and not all of them part of the show. One of the pleasures of going to that dress rehearsal was the infectious enthusiasm and good cheer of the volunteer stewards, or games makers, who ushered the large crowd through the Westfield shopping centre to the Olympic Park entrance, supervised the queues and nursed us through the inevitable logjam as we waited for trains to get us home. There are 70,000 of these people and they'll be performing a wide variety of tasks, not all of them in and around the venues. But those with whom the public, visitors and residents alike, come into contact over the coming weeks will surely find their Olympic experience enhanced. Drawn from the full and broad spectrum of Londoners, they seemed to me to personify the capital at its most generous and appealing. Whatever may go wrong, the games makers seem to have got it right. The Guardian on London London 2012 - full coverage Big Ben to chime for three minutes to mark Olympic opening Olympics have changed the Lower Lea Valley beyond recognition Transport authorities report smooth start to Games route changes Olympics diary: tweeting Games Time history Olympics diary: angles on the athletes' village Olympics diary: Locog on the road Dozens stranded as Thames cable car breaks Olympics: the impact of commercialisation on the games Opening of Games could see 'perfect storm' of smog pollution My perfect London day out by the author of Quiet London The World in London exhibition – in pictures Another London at Tate Britain - in pictures London blogosphere From The Great Wen: It's unlikely that any of the world's top cyclists will be thinking about London's history with the bike when they set off from the Mall for the gruelling 250km Olympic road race on Saturday, but if they do pause for thought, they're starting from the right place. The route will take cyclists through Putney, Richmond and Hampton Court deep into the scenic Surrey countryside of Woking and round Box Hill, but it starts and finishes near Hyde Park, which is where cycling in the UK first really took off. Deep history. Now read on . Coming up Until I burrowed into the schedule of Olympics events I hadn't appreciated the number it is possible to see for free. I make it that there are nine of these spread across the 17 days of the games, beginning with that men's cycle road race on Saturday and the women's one on Sunday. The Guardian has more on this here . I'll be getting around town as much as possible, seeing all I can and writing and tweeting about it daily - not just the sport, but the travelling there and back and the mood of the capital at large. See you around.