Group Riding - April 19

Set off from camp back down a sandy road and on to the main road. We quickly became a pretty good group of 6, then 8, then 10 – people joining us from behind, picking up people in front. Soon get to the point where we are a group of 20. Even the racers caught us up from behind and stayed with us. Today is now only 140 something km because of the extra 12 we had to do yesterday!! The road started to get worse and worse – they are building a new one here but we couldn’t decide whether they had just laid it down quickly or what – it was tarmaced but with lots of patched potholes – in a dreadful state! It was quite hard to ride especially in that big a group. The pace was good though – about 30kmph. Every now and then somebody would pick it up a bit – which did hurt me – but generally it was fairly good. It was great to have so many riding together. We rode most of the day like that – even after lunch. About 40 km from the end Dennis and Adam took off and rode off the front – nobody else seemed to care though! About 8 km from the end was a village where we stopped to sort out money and even went on the internet. There was also a Wimpy – we sat there talking about how nice it is that although Scott, myself and Jorg are racing each other we are quite happy to stop together at a Wimpy like this. Jorg is third in the race, Scott 5th and I am now 6th – Tori just behind in 7th . We had chicken sandwiches and milkshakes and planned to return in the morning. At camp there were hotel rooms and I just couldn’t resist. We actually went to look at their “luxury” tents – which seemed really nice – however in the end we opted for the wooden chalet rooms with air conditioning and a great bathroom!! It was very cool!!