I quickly caught up with Alice and Angela and rode with them for a while – I thought I could see Kari’s group up ahead, but it turned out not to be! Then the racers came up behind so I hopped on the back of them for a while – just to use them to get to my group. Scott had come along earlier on his own at about 5km in – I had given him a water bottle as he didn’t have one. He had then taken off really quickly before I had a chance to speak – today is a short race just till lunch – so I thought he was maybe going for a solo race and win. He is really good on his own and I sable to go flat out for about 70 km quite easily! I felt bad that I should have helped him but he took off so quickly. So what I did was try to slow the racers down when I was riding with them earlier, by taking a longer turn at the front and slowing the pace. I hoped that would buy Scott a little extra time – a little cushion if he was out front!!
Finally we caught up with my group and I let the racers go. We had a coke stop at about 44km – I really enjoyed it thinking it would be my last one for a while as I intended to race next week. Then lunch at 75 km. There was not a lot to see on the ride today – rolling hills with quite a few large potholes! After lunch we decided to head for the airport – Kari needed to change her flight and we had heard there was some good food to be had! As we approached the airport we could see hills in the distance. We ended up in a nice café and enjoyed some cake, coffee, beer and chicken pasta! We were there for quite a while before we decided to set off! It was 1 km back to our route – as soon as we hit the right road we also hit a really strong headwind. It was a miserable, miserable ride! We had expected a fairly easy 50 km taking about 2 hours – but we were struggling to go at even 22kmph – it was going to take nearer 3 hours!! It was also getting more and more hilly! We now noticed more much better quality cars on the road and at about 10 km out it really is looking a lot like southern California – with big mansions on either side of the road – big fancy houses built into the side of the hills – the only difference was they were protected by barbed wire!!
We were finally sheltered more from the elements as we rode through a city. The day really dragged though – it was quite tough! Another long day of 100 miles – so it was good to be done and reach our camp at Windhoek!
Fortunately Kendra had booked us some rooms at the Youth Hostel the day before. We changed our tyres as we will be back off road in the next section, cleaned our bikes and sorted out a few other things. Quite a few of the Sectional riders are leaving today so we all went down to the Hostel and hung out there together, before heading off to an Italian restaurant for a really good meal – pasta, pizza and cake!! Then we all went to a bar which ended up being packed with the majority of TdA’ers there to see the 10 Sectional riders off! We were on a really fun table – chatting away and yes even did a few shots!! We also discovered this restaurant served a really good game menu – kudu, zebra, onyx etc etc and so planned to return tomorrow night!
I was pretty tired by now and was thinking of going off to bed – however outside I managed to get pushed into a taxi with a load of people going off to a Club!! There were about 18 of us in the shuttle taxi and I still though they could just drop me off at the Youth Hostel . We ended up driving round town for ages – there was a lot of singing going on – it was quite fun. And yes there was dancing involved for a couple more hours before I managed to leave to go to bed!!
No comments:
Post a Comment