Back for more in 06/07. Div3 racing at it's finest. www.stevens-racing.de

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Norge

I don't know one single word of Norske. Nothing. So sudden was my departure that I did not have a chance to find a phrasebook or dictionary or anything, although maybe my chances of finding and English/Norske book in Hamburg might have been slim. Now I feel like a complete tool trying buy stuff at the grocery store, cause I can't even say please or thank you. Good thing all the locals speak super-good English and are ridiculously happy to use it. Like ecstatic.

So the overnight ferry from Kiel was the dope shit. Check it out - we drive an hour and a half from Hamburg, load onto this big-ass boat at 1.30pm (no problems with the bikes & racks, sweet), and then basically chill out, walk around, eat in reastaurants and generally take it easy until 9.30 the next day when we roll out in to the sunshine in Oslo. No stress. No airplane legs. No, we did not hit the on-board nightclub. Slept awesome too.

Norway is beautiful. Now that I am here, I don't want to go home after only two stages, I want to stay for the whole thing! And then maybe never go back. It's that nice. Bit of a rough place to be a cyclist though, the roads are all super-narrow and heavily travelled. It looks like there's only a couple of hundred kilometers of motorway in the whole country, so all the traffic still runs on the small roads. The problem being, of course, that the land just doesn't allow for building big straight roads. Really, really beautiful though.

Christian had this great idea that we should ride the last 50km or so to the hotel, and idea with which, at least in principle, I agree with. This did, however, result in the 5 of us standing around naked at the side of the road somewhere on the way from Oslo to Beitostølen. The fact that the old guy getting his mail across the street didn't even seem to care led me to make the only possible assumption under the circumstances - that this is a perfectly normal thing to do in Norway.

Oh yeah, and 40 of the last 50 km were uphill. The upside, or indeed, the downside (depending on how I'm feeling), is that these are the same 50km as the last 50km of tomorrow's stage. So now we've seen the stage end, but now we also know that it is HARD. Whee. That'll feel good after I complete my task for tomorrow (see below).

I never really know when Jens is joking. The task list for tomorrow: Benny - sprint ; Heule - prepare the spring for Benny ; Tim van Nuffle - "ride like Lucien" (van Impe, old school Belgian climber of Tour fame) ; Presslauer - "ride for Lucien" ; Greg - "since you're only here for two days, full gas both days". So does that mean that I go on the attack at km 1? The first 40 are all downhill, so...maybe after 40 minutes or so. Geez. Wireless internet at the hotel means I might be able to let you know how it works out.

I think it's only dark for like 3 hours here.

GReain

1 Comments:

Blogger Matt said...

Nice dude! Hope it goes well!

6/07/2006 05:44:00 AM

 

Post a Comment

<< Home