Journey/day 1

Well the journey over was pretty uneventful and I had the bonus of three seats to myself on the final leg from Kuala Lumpur. The weather in Amsterdam was a bit of a shock, thick fog! I thought I'd left that behind in Maffra, however unlike Maffra this wasn't the freezing variety but thick humid fog that soon turned to torrential showers and then to bright sunshine that had me reaching for the sunnies.

The journey down through Holland and then across Belgium was pretty uneventful except for one small detail, I'd picked up the wrong mini disk of map files for the Sat Nav!!! Duh!!! So with no SatNav an no Dutch maps I had to wing it. My basic knowledge of the geography of the two countries was good enough to navigate basically from town to town along the freeway system until hit the border, its pretty easy then Antwerp to Brussels, hang a right to head towards Ghent and jump of the freeway just after Aalst to find my little village of Erondegem. Only one small difficulty, texts started arriving on my mobile from my wife and in the course of checking these out I missed the right to Ghent and sailed straight into the centre of Brussels (capital of the EU and busy busy town!). However more by luck than judgement I managed to negotiate the centre of town by trying to balance each right turn with a balancing left? seemed logical at the time and I did arrive at the main Ghent freeway flawlessly. Lucky huh!

A quick stop at the big bike shop in Aalst to pick up some bike essentials and of course eyeball a huge range of cycling goodies that I don't see in Oz, well not Maffra anyway, just as well I don't have too much rook for extras on the way back - Hilda would kill me. Another stop at the greengrocer's to stock up on fruit for snacking on and head off to the hotel.

Didn't take long to unpack, my bike went together easily enough, so I settled down to watch Le Tour, I had a choice of languages and I opted for Dutch for no particular reason other than the commentator's voice didn't grate.

Difficult job now is to stay awake as long as I can so that I sleep the night through here and get my body into the new time zone.