Well I think summer has finally settled in. Have had a couple weeks of sunny hot weather and I'm loving it. Spent most of my time riding my Time Trial bike last week preparing for the Top Competition Team Time Trial on Sunday. I was looking forward to chucking on the disk wheel and going for a good hoon on the TT rig. It was " "bit of a drive" according to Andrew. It was only about 1.5 hours, that's just a casual drive down to Cambridge, but if you're driving for over an hour and a half here in Belgium then you're probably in a different country by the end of the trip. We went across Belgium and were near the very bottom of Holland, very close to Liege. The area where the TT course was very nice, lots of very big nice houses and nice farm land and I think I saw some wineries, not really sure though cause I trying to pay attention to the race. The course was 3 laps of an 18.5km lap totaling to 56km. It was an awesome course that suited me pretty well. It had a bit of everything in it with a couple small climbs, false flats, downhill sections, a technical corners and a dog. We were about 5km into our ride and we were approaching a right hander when a small dog just casually comes trotting around the corner. Then you hear from the back of the group 'aw shit, it's a dog!" Everyone had seen it and we were slamming on the anchors! I was sitting second wheel out of the 6 riders in the team and my breaks weren't working to good so I went flying past the rider in front of me! (Who needs breaks for a Time Trail anyway!) Luckily we were all on the left hand side of the road approaching the corner and the dog was on the right so we were able to avoid it but we were still unsure if it was gonna freak out and run into us. It was a bloody hot day and I couldn't fit a bottle cage on to my bike so I went drinkless but I still managed to survive, only taking a sip out of Taylors drink once. We lost one of our riders early because he had an injury but we could still finish with only 4 riders so the 5 of us were rolling around alright for pretty much the rest of the race. There were 4 kiwis in the team, including me, doing the race and two Belgys and everyone worked pretty well considering the 6 of us had never done a TTT all together before. I was feeling really good the whole race and was doing some good turns on the front. On the 2nd lap I hit a really big bump in the road and my bars slipped down a little bit, sounded like I cracked my bars but I didn't find any crack, really hope I didn't. We dropped our last rider with about 5km to go and crossed the line. I was pretty happy with how I was feeling for my first TT in a while. The team did well to. We came 14th out of the 20 teams which Isn't too bad considering these are top Belgium teams we were racing against and we just rocked up there, no Team Time Trial training what so ever and some teams had been riding at that course for a few days preparing for this race.
After the race we went to a bar restaurant and had a couple beers and some dinner there. The restaurant was an old farm house I think and had a big court area in the middle where we sat and ate and in the entrance that had old German plane engines and in the backyard they had a US tank and a US helicopter that kind of looks like the ones in M*A*S*H*. They had a couple big old airplane bombs too.
Got another Pro Kermesse on Thursday which should be good fun, try and avoid the ditches this time.
Like I said, summer is properly here now, all the fields have something growing in it. They love to grow their corn here but it's pretty annoying cause now you can't really see around the corners so now you have to slow right down a pop your head out cause the roads are so skinny that you can only fit one car down it.
Taylor and I are getting sick of the flies so Taylor went out and bought those fly stickers that you stick to your windows. The flies mainly like the area where the computer is on the table and there's two windows, one behind me and one to the left of me so Taylor stuck one on each window and the flies are really loving the window to the left of me. There are about 16 dead flies on the ledge, and one in a spider web (I killed a fly just then! That's the third one I've got since I started writing this blog) and on the other window there are only about 6 dead ones. You know you're starting to get bored when you start counting the amount of flies you have killed for that today.
Taylor and I went out to Kortrijk this morning and met up with another Kiwi rider and had a look around the local markets that they set up every Monday morning. Had a nice coffee with my name written in it and then had lunch at a Wok Noodle place which was some good kai then went out for a nice ride in the sun when we got back.

So yea, I'll leave you a couple pictures below.

Thanks for reading

Nick

My Latte Macchiato in Kortrijk 

Near the entrance to the bar restaurant place

The US tank. Couldn't get a photo of the helicopter cause it was behind a fence