We're now in Frankfurt at Alana's mum's place, which is really nice. Neither of us had ever met her before and we just turned up at 1130 after an early start, stinking after a night in the woods. All our clothes were filthy, and Duncan refuses to shave off that ridiculous excuse for a beard, so he looked even more homeless. Still, she took us in, we showered, I shaved, and she even washed all our clothes (the stink coming from the groin of our cycling bib-shorts was INSANE. That woman is a saint). Then she took us out to a restaurant, refusing to let us pay our way. We felt guilty, we'd never met this woman before and I had absolutely no connection to her. Still, let the good times roll! Duncan right now is helping to teach a student with her so we're helping out where we can. Plus, obviously our dinner-time chat is priceless.
Past few days have been quite hard. Dunc and I have both been eating far too little and we think we've averaged a 3000 calorie a day deficit. Trouble is, we've allocated a 20 euro a day budget each, which includes campsite fees if we're not wild camping. This limits us to supermarket food.
The only food that's suitable without a stove is ham and bread and cold tinned food, so we've been getting thinner and thinner. Plus the mornings are generally freezing (our load-outs are designed for Greece and Egypt, but it isn't 40 degrees C yet!) so we want to get going ASAP, which means a small breakfast. I tried to deck a tin of corned beef the other day, but spoon after spoon of the stuff gets a little boring. I'm still waiting to buffalo Duncan on a 800g can of ravioli. Down she goes!!
All this means we've been hitting the wall earlier each day. Yesterday and the day before had some monster climbs too which just mashed up our legs. They feel like the cold ravioli we ate for dinner a few days ago. Like pasty ground-up meat mixed with rusk and barely a muscle-fibre to string it together. Cycling feels like we're cycling through treacle and it's made worse by the fact that the bikes are slowly deteriorating too. Strangely, though, morale is high, and after each climb you just have to laugh about how destroyed our bodies are!
This is what we've done each day so far:
Day 1: Calais to Saint-Omer. 55km - FRANCE
Day 2: Saint-Omer to Lille. 52km
Day 3: Rest day. 33km
Day 4: Lille to Oudenaart. 72km - BELGIUM
Day 5: Oudenaart to Brussels. 80km
Day 6: Brussels to Soumagne. 126.6km
Day 7: Rest day. 10km
Day 8: Soumagne to National Park. 98km - GERMANY
Day 9: Wild camping to Koblenz. 96.4km
Day 10: Koblenz to wild camping. 66.2km
Day 11: Wild camping to Bad Homburg. 56km
Day 12: Rest day in Bad Homburg.
Next few days:
Day 13: Rest day, a bit soft I know but we need it.
Day 14: Bad Homburg to Hafenlohr. 100km
Day 15: Hafenlohr to Scheinfeld. 80km
Day 16: Scheinfeld to Nurnberg. 65km
Day 17: Nurnberg to Irchenrieth. 95km
Day 18: Irchenrieth to Plzen. 100km - Czech Republic
Day 19: Plzen to Prague. 95km
That's our next milestone and we'll take a couple of days off there. Watch this space for a few photos! Oh, on Day 8 we climbed through the snow line on a monster 12km long climb! That was cool.
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