Excellent days riding today after an inauspicious start – living out of a Touratech pannier requires a certain amount of OCD and my routine of ignition key storage was thwarted last night in the torrential rain with the result this morning of a lost hour trying to find it… only to have it turn up in my waterproof trousers pocket. Managed about 530 Km today and arrived at Voreppe around 18:00. Stopped in the pine forests near Arinthod to each fresh peaches with only the insects for company and hoards of brown and white butterfly’s – looks like the rain is long gone. Met two old fishermen casting for salmon in the icy waters near Lagineu – comparisons with the Usk remain.
Eastern Europe (rain like little knives)
Today started auspiciously enough, turning up like a drowned rat at the P&O port in Dover elicited enough sympathy from the check-in team that they bumped me up to the earlier ferry – just as well considering riding conditions over the Channel. Initially I made good time stopping for mandatory coffee when ever a road side café loomed into the horizon. About 100 miles north of my overnight stop the sky darkened over a period of a few minutes and lightening danced on the horizon north of Troyes. Without a gentle lead into rain the heavens opened and the road became an impassable sea of rocks and mud scattered by oncoming traffic and churned to slurry in the maelstrom – like all good hero’s I took refuge under the canopy of the petrol station and made my way onto Bar Le Duc – its takes a while to get into the rhythm of mileage – tomorrow is a new day and the forecast looks promising.
Blogging Hardware
Blogging, poetry and writing on the road has always been done by me using pencil an paper but I have just specified and had delivered a semi rugged net book designed and built by Novatech in Cardiff – 500GB SSD and running Win 7 Pro with Open office and all my mapping software (BaseCamp and MapSource) lets see how the equipment performs this year in the shakedown tours before the 2012 expedition.
You can now follow me on Twitter
New Web Site Launched
My twitter following is almost in double figures now – not bad for a man who is a bit of a technical luddite but precisely 3,734,435 behind Steven Fry…so I have decide to launch my separate travelling and photography website – welcome.