Starting to wrap up

Well i have finally booked a flight home and am flying home on the 11th of September which I am looking forward to. Its been a long season with a lot of highlights and alot of memories to take home. Unfortunately I wont be able to ride up until the day I fly so my last day on the bike will be this Sunday. This has an upside i guess as it forces me to have a break before getting home. I haven't had a break since Southland last year, so mentally I'm pretty tired to be honest.

Tomorrow i head of driving for 3 days to see some of the country we have raced yet, so lets hope its some good weather. Going to cruise mainly around Devon and Cornwall as its supposed to be quite nice down there.

A wee update on the kit, went to pick it up and the same gent served me, he folded all the kit and put it in a bag and handed it to me. He then went to serve the next customer til i handed him some cash, so could have been a huge Deal opportunity had i not paid...but thats not cool.

Deal or No deal

After a rage fuelled incident at the flat the other night, we are currently minus a working washing machine. All week its been throwing it down so there has been a lot of very wet, very dirty kit to wash by had, it cracked me though and i went in search today of a Laundromat.


So I found one pretty easy in the high street and thats where the fun started. I started speaking to the man on the counter who was not local, i rekon Algerian, and told him what i needed. Well he started like it was an auction starting at 7 quid, then up to 10 quid then back, throwing in things like drying sorting. I hadn't even had a chance to say much att his point until he said 5 quid washed, dried and folded...bargain! so i jumped at that price.

He thought he had a bargin so I was more than happy. The proof will be in the pudding though and lets hope the kit doesn't get fried or he doesn't start re negotiating the price when i come back tomorrow to collect it...stay tuned!

How to engineer a race win...the hard way

We had 6 guys line up at the Python road race on sunday which was 130km around a pretty much flat course. The boys who were going to Ireland wanted to sharpen up with a tough race so the plan was to let a small break get 3 minutes before riding it back. Well things didn't really go according to plan as the break went out to 5.45 and there were 8 guys in it! Oh well time to ride it back.

To cut a long story short we brought it back then gordy clipped off and won, but not without a fair bit of effort and its fair to say we were all in the box after the race. I think it took Milly a couple of hours to come round...he was so bad he opted for the salad for dinner.

I did have an interesting moment during the race, while we were riding the front I went back for some bottles for the lads and just as I got the last one on board, my front wheel decided to blow and i snapped a spoke in the middle. Now its not a good look to go back for bottles and never make it back, so i decided to risk not changing the wheels till the bottles were dropped.

So it was bottles to the lads, then a front wheel change before chasing back on and back to the front, all while we had the pink train in full chase mode...that'll fist ya!

A different way to get in a break

it was the last prem cal of the season on sunday up in pendle and part of my plan for the day was to not cover any of the early moves. I had no problem with this and as the flag was pulled from the lead car i thought i had made a smart decision as 200m after the neutral was over we were climbing a 1500m climb. This is just what you needed after rolling a stupidly slow 7km neutral zone in the pissing rain...but that climb is another story as i actually made it over in better shape than others who were chasing over the top.

Anyway there was about 10km between that and the main climb of the circuit which was 4km climb and somehow in a moment of confusion I ended up on the wrong side of a long stretch of road barriers. I must have looked rather silly with 100 riders on one side of the road and me on the other but i got the last laugh. After about 400m the road came back together at a roundabout, which i had the short side around, and when someone laid it down in the roundabout when i rejoined i was in the front group of 16. Nice work but very much not the plan!

that's about the only highlight of the race unfortunatly.