Stage One

Well we've started the 10in10 ride. This morning we loaded the bikes on the motorhome
packed all our kit and camping gear and set off for Colchester.
Mind you even though we had tried the bikes out on the rear rack at our training camp it still took us almost an hour to sort them out.....truth be told none of us could remember the order we had decided was the best way to stack them
Anyway job was done in the end and we were dropped by Dave south of Colchester. The plan today was to have a short legspinner ride just to loosen the legs and give the bikes a shakedown to ensure that everything was running ok.
It was nice to actually get started even though all of today's ride was into a headwind. I can report that the bike and riders are all fine. Today's ride was just a thirty mile spin just to get us ready for the real distances which will start tomorrow with about 96 miles across the Netherlands and into Belgium.
We are now in the ferry queue and will be boarding in about an hour....leaving the UK at 23.15hrs. We land in Rotterdam at breakfast time tomorrow.
Hopefully by tomorrow evening we will have touched three of the ten countries.......
The picture in this post shows the lads unloading the bikes before today's legspinner...........