Monday 16 July 2007

STILL THE LIFE =)

Firstly I must apologise to everbody that I promised I would contact while I was here in France. If I could guarentee that the money spent on a phone card would be replaced by tour winnings, then I may have given it a thought. But I'm afraid that the only means of contacting you all will be via email, aside from some hopeful verbal conversation to my Mum sometime throughtout the 6 week period, sorry Pip!

After keeping Lou up for half an hour last night with my snoring we woke to grey skies, the thought of rain and what seemed to be a blow up dog on top our team car. We later discovered that our new team mascot, now named ‘Roofus’, had been adopted that morning from a bush after a party down the road had gone astray last night. Let it be noted that Michel is not a fan… During our training ride we performed some wheel changes, bidon changes, lead-outs and even allowed Ath to practise her road-side feeding. Our motivation stemmed not only from the beautiful rainforest surroundings with pleasant towns, narrow roads and a cool breeze, but also from the unearthing of news that Robbie McEwen, Stuart O‘Grady, Mick Rogers and Brett Lancaster were out of the ‘Tour De France’!

Despite riding our last half hour in the rain we decided to head into ‘Tours’ for a brief shopping period and some serious internet time. Negotiating with a Frenchman isn’t easy therefore not many items were purchased, the exception…if your name is Kate Mercer. The drive seemed epic so on return the girls had no choice but to devour an incomprehensible amount of bread. We were always dreading our final night in this gorgeous location and decided to celebrate with a large home cooked meal, thanks 95% to the doing of our soigneur Athalee. Despite the fact we weren’t overly hungry after another bread devouring session, we didn’t hold back on the food intake. And if you had sampled it, you wouldn’t have blamed us.