Busy..busy....

CFC Team Kit

 Well things have been pretty busy here at Purple Towers with preparations for our Ten in Ten ride...I got back from a training ride this morning and a parcel had been left by our local postman...
Yes...It was the Team Kit provided for us by Cyclists Fighting Cancer which is the charity that we will be riding for as we make our way through ten countries on our big ride in June... 

With our matching team kit we will all look as if we mean business as we throw our legs over our bikes when we head off on our group training rides over the next few months....
It does make a big difference when you are all in matching kit and hopefully it will help us to feel and look more like a cycling team and not the group of ageing men dressed in lycra that we really are!! 

As well as the Team Kit arriving, Dave (the broom) who amongst everything else is our Team Manager and does almost every other job that doesn't actually involve cycling, has been busy too. He's been beavering away in the background checking out ferry routes for our exit from and entry to the UK. 
Those ferries have now been booked and it is official and confirmed that we will be leaving from the Port of Harwich on a ferry bound for the Netherlands on the second weekend in June. 

Our first day on Saturday the 8th June will include a drive from down here on the South Coast up to Colchester. 
From there we will ride a convoluted route on the bikes between Colchester to Harwich. 
I say convoluted, because it's not that many miles between those two points and we want to stretch out the distance a bit in order to make that first days ride a reasonable distance. 

As I understand it the ferry will be leaving at about 2300hrs and we will be able (hopefully) to get a reasonable nights sleep on board in our cabins before disembarking in the Netherlands for our second day at about 08.00hrs.  
Before that of course we have a lot of hard work in training to complete and I hope to post some images of those sessions over the next few months...

Nothing like good bike maintenance.....and  this is nothing like it..!!

A nifty change of subject now.....
There is nothing that pleases me more than a nicely maintained bike, with nice well lubed drive train and all the nuts and bolts all nice and shiny and clean....so you can imagine what I thought when this bike was shown to me the other day....

There I was cleaning my bike at the end of a ride...re-lubing my drive train....checking nuts and bolts for tension etc and polishing up my bikes frame to make it ready for the next ride when a guy walks up my drive with the above bike and says that he hoped that I didn't mind him asking me, but he had been having problems with his bike as everything seemed really stiff and it didn't seem to ride properly....

He went on trying to butter me up by telling me that he was asking me, because he realized that I was a keen cyclist as he had seen me head out most days on one of my bikes....
He thought that it would be better to ask me than take it along to the local bike shop because he was a bit worried about being charged a lot for something that might be simple and straightforward to put right.....!!!

I won't go in to exactly what I said.....I will just leave that to your imaginations!!