Nice easy day today, plan was for 2 hours easy endurance, nothing hard, just get my legs spinning. I almost achieved it, Jurgen, my host, is building new house in Dendermonde a pretty spot on one of the main canals in Belgium He's been on at me for a few days to go and see it, I guess he's pretty proud of it. He's building it 'owner- builder' style, you don't seem to need qualified tradesmen and apparently the inspection process is pretty light as well. The thing that did strike me was that there is an in-ground pool, no fencing, but I guess there are so many canals and rivers in the country that fencing might be seen as irrelevant, but is odd to see.
Even though Jurgen printed me out a map and marked my route on it I still managed to miss one key turning which meant I was on the wrong side of the canal and had to do extra K's, not the end of the world and I managed to find the house OK once I got myself back on track.
I'm not a 'construction' person and had really only gone because he kept onto me and he has been very helpful in all sorts of things. The style he described as typical Flandrian, I might call it mock chateau, a bit pretentious for my taste. The actual construction is an interesting mix of carved stone, exposed wood worked in the old style, you know wooden dowels and all that stuff, mixed with breeze block interiors and concrete slabs. Jurgen was proud of his wiring and has even installed fibre optic interior data cabling for his Internet and TV distribution. That's about the only thing I know a little about and I did point out to him it's OK having the fastest cabling you can get internally but if he's delivered data at 4 or 8kb it won't make any difference what he has internally. I guess he knew that but he was kind of hoping that Belgium Telecomm would upgrade the national system sometime in his life time, a bit like us hoping that Telstra will do the same, fat chance.
So having paid a visit to the new mansion I headed home another way, I was doing great until I was forced off my planned route by a road closure and detour, the problem there was that every junction wasn't signposted so my ride back was again a little longer, still it all only added up to two and a half hour's and it was a sunny day if a bit windy.
I must say that although I was trying not to push on, the few times I was required to press harder my legs responded by feeling pretty dead, I think those two hilly races and two laps solo really left their mark. Hopefully an afternoon lounging under the sun umbrella and another good nights sleep will set me up for tomorrow's race which I have been assured is much flatter! Assuming that it is flatter and my legs have indeed recovered it is my intention to be very aggressive from early in the race and not be coming from behind in the second half because I'm feeling strong.
I've still got to finish my bike for the race, I may leave that for the morning, the girls chase me out of my room anyway to clean it etc. I've been shopping laying in what will probably be my final supply of fruit, some packing materials for the extra wheels I am now bringing back and some degreaser so I can clean the running gear properly, its very sandy here especially when its raining and its difficult to clean properly any other way.
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