Wednesday 16th July
Well, we’ve had a few days to settle in. Very nice accommodation, we are in apartments. Ours is a three bedroom, two bathroom one which is really cool. Washer/Drier/clothes line, just like being in a town house really. I guess that’s what they are as they are owned by people and when they’re not here the resort rents the apartments out on the person’s behalf. There is a little gym which is okay, there are a couple of things that Jayne and I can’t do in it so we may have to go to the main gym that’s about 45 minutes drive from here. If we do that once a week and use the gym here once a week I think that won’t be too bad.
We had an excellent flight to Perth. The take off s and landings in both countries weren’t the best, rather rough actually. They’d been having thunderstorms in Perth so the weather was a bit yuk when we arrived. The next morning I put the bikes together and we went for a ride. It was a nice day so that was good. The roads are very good over here, not rough at all. The motorists seem to be pretty good so far. The truckies are average. Most are okay but you get the odd one that doesn’t give you much room which is a bit scary for they are usually the road trains that seem to be a mile long that don’t want to give you the room. All others are good.
Haven’t seen any spiders or snakes yet – thank goodness – I think I’ll run a mile in record time if I see a huge spider, snakes don’t worry me too much. I’d rather a snake to a spider any day.
We went grocery shopping on Monday, wow, it was a goodie. Mind you we had to start from scratch really. Still need to go back and get things like glad wrap, ties, etc, things that you think of later.
Yesterday we found some ripper hills. I’d swear that one of them would have been a good 16 – 18% climb, man it was a goodie. We were going up it at 6kph and just hanging on. We didn’t have much choice but to go up it as we’d already gone down the hill. That’s okay; at least it wasn’t too long a hill. We were kinda not sure exactly where we were so just kept riding. Finally came out at one of the roundabouts that we’d already been through so that was a relief. It was very windy too which made descending not very pleasant. We were getting blown around the place. It started to rain when we were just about back at the unit, didn’t get too wet thank goodness.
Last night at about 10:45pm I heard a noise, I eventually worked out that it was rain (it woke me up so I was a bit disorientated) then there was a very loud crash/boom. Oh joy, it was thunder. I lay there for a bit waiting to hear more but it didn’t happen. I said to Jayne this morning about it and she said that it carried on throughout the night. I must have been sound asleep as I didn’t hear a thing after that first initial one. The rain has been on and off this morning, sometimes rather heavy. We are hoping that it will clear up as we have got time trial efforts to do today and I don’t want to get onto the wind trainer…….we shall see what happens. It’s suppose to clear up – fingers crossed. I must say, the weather forecasters seem to be pretty accurate with their predictions as yesterday they said by mid morning it would be raining and it was.
Saturday 19th July
Today dawned bright but cool. After the yesterday it was nice. As most of you probably know Perth had a storm yesterday. Where we are it didn’t really affect us much at all. We got a lot of rain (some pretty good downpours at times) and quite a bit of wind but not like what South Perth got. Last night was a slightly different story though, boy it cut up a bit rougher, thunder, hail/rain, heaps more wind. It was nice that we had the day off. We went into the Midlands Mall for a couple of hours which was cool. Talk about getting lost, man it’s a big mall. All of us went in and went our own ways. Jayne and I had to buy some slippers (it is winter after all although I must say it’s a lot warmer than home). We’ve plenty more weeks here to go back and shop…….
Our training has been going well, on Thursday we got 100km in before the rain came down, phew, it took awhile as I kept on going down roads that were dead ends, oh well, we did eventually get there and we did enjoy the ride. Today we did an 80km ride with a number of efforts in it. Found some more roads (only two dead ends this time), I’m starting to discover where the roads join up/go which is neat. We’ve found some good time trial roads – brilliant – looking forward to getting on the TT bike and having a decent blast.
This will get you all going…….yesterday morning I got up and of course as I do I don’t have my contacts in or glasses on so I’m basically half blind walking around the place. Went out into the kitchen to make a cuppa, walked into the dining area and spotted something the on floor, couldn’t quite see what it was – thought it was a bit of dirt……………..how wrong was I, it was a bloody spider!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not a monster by any means (probably the size of a 50c piece) but if it’s bigger than a speck it’s too big for me. I let out a squeal and got a dirty tea towel, chucked it over the spider and jumped on it!!!!!!! And not just once either, I made sure it wasn’t going to crawl out. Eventually my breathing went back to normal and I put my contacts in so I could see properly…….sorry to all those that love spiders. There were none today so that was good. I’m blowed if I know how they get in but they do…..
Each day we spend the afternoons/evenings in the café on the internet. It’s quite cool really. We’ve certainly got the time to fit everything into the day. I’ve been watching the Tour de France and really enjoying it. Sometimes if I’m awake at 4:30am I’ll get up and watch the hour of highlights/last hour of racing and then go back to bed for an hour or so. It’s great!
Well, not much more to write about today. Tomorrow we are going to go and find the cycle way that follows the Swan River. Apparently it’s a nice ride so let’s see if we can get there and back. Shouldn’t be a problem, I’ve just got to remember which bridge to get back onto to head home.
