Tour d'Afrique

Thunder, lightning, wind and rain made for a fitful night of sleep. Finally managed to clean the pipes this morning, it's not very comfortable to squat with tired sore legs. Kind of a funny start today, I never heard a thing and just saw people on the road so I got going too. Favorable wind so I'm passing loads of people. I'm lucky to catch the fast group since one of them had a flat. I decided to wait for them and help out since everyone is pretty supportive. Pretty well everyone passes us but when we get back on the saddle, it's full speed ahead to catch the second group and we're doing about 50km/hr. We get to the lead and then we all get stopped at a police checkpoint because they are worried about the road being flooded. After about 20 minutes, they figured we're safe. I decide to let the big boys hash it out and I stay with the top two ladies and a three other guys, one of them Eric from Baie Comeau has signed up to do Race across America three weeks after this ends. Impressive! Easy ride into lunch where the top group is about to leave, Eric skips lunch and joins them,I'm staying with my easy day strategy, the group leaves during my call to nature so I have some catching up to do but with the easy wind today it's not a problem. The two ladies are not quite keeping up so the three guys start to pull away. One of them eventually drops back to check on his wife so there's only two of us. We hit a fierce headwind with 25km to go and our speed drops to 20km/hr. The nightmare from yesterday resurfaces in our minds and the pain is back. Fortunately the road makes a turn about 5km further and we can resume a good pace. As we get closer, I was thinking about asking Stuart, the other fellow if he wanted to cruise in or battle it out. I got my answer when he started cranking it a few km before the end. It turns out I either had more gears or more juice since I took the sprint and was quite surprised to see the two ladies and the other guy fairly close behind. They might have caught us by surprise if we had just cruised in. My first strong finish with a relatively painless 5th place and a 33km/hr average on 134km. We had to ride another 10km because camp wasn't suitable so tomorrow will be less than 100km and a shower at the end. The wind is howling again and it's quite chilly. Full sleeping bag tonight. Food at dinner is excellent and so is the soup in the early afternoon.