Ride time: 4:45
Climb: 912m
Best thing: Hacking apart the frozen meat blocks.
Worst thing: No truck with luggage.
After staying up to 1am listening to people watching the gold medal
hockey game in the hotel's bar, I was pretty tired, so decided to take
it slow and see how I went. The rider briefing said that there was a
30km climb out of lunch up to the town of Mega, so I was pretty
reluctant to push it in the morning.
Well, it turned out that the 30km climb was actually around 15km of
around a 5% grade. So pretty cruisy really. And once I got to the top,
there was an awesome view down through a cleft in the hills, over Mega
and towards the border. There was also a cool ruined fort or
something. The strange thing is, even on going slow days, I can't bear
to stop for five minutes and have a look around or take any photos. I
could also see the rain clouds all over the plain that we were going
to be camping on.
That rain started pretty soon after I got into camp. Bad news. The
christmas tree truck, with all of the racers' luggage on it, had
broken down at lunch and wasn't expected for a while. This meant that
we had no tents to shelter in and only whatever wet weather gear we'd
carried on our camelbaks. Luckily, I brought rain pants and a riding
shell. Unluckily, I'd unzipped the hood for the shell back in
Australia and left it in the boot of my car, so I got a pretty wet
head sitting in the rain. Ok, that wasn't unlucky, it was stupid. Some
people brought no wet weather gear though so they got cold and
sheltered in the truck.
Most days, I get in early enough from the ride to help out with the
kitchen. This is normally pretty boring - washing carrots or peeling
garlic. Today started off that way as well. Peeling carrots. But,
after the carrots there was meat prep to do. This would have been
pretty boring as well, but the meat blocks hadn't thawed yet, so I got
to spend half and hour wrestling with steaks, strips of fat and chunks
of bone. It is kind of satisfying to be tearing that apart with your
bare hands, then look down and just see cubes of meat.
Dan's Camping Tip: Always know where these things are before you go to
sleep: your shoes; your headlamp; your toilet paper / baby wipes; and,
your toilet paper / baby wipes burning lighter.
You have to burn your Nazi gold once you found it?
ReplyDeleteI'm split down the line when thinking about the meat wielding abilities of Dan.
ReplyDelete(A) Dan now knows what it feels like to be Wolverine.
(B) I hope that Dan found the baby wipes etc (from the camping tip) before tearing at the meat with his bare hands (unless it was some EFI strategy against the other riders!)