…our legs have gone all trembly, la la la, lah… Apologies to our US followers to whom this will mean nothing. Suffice to say it’s a soccer chant.
Anyway…it was back to reality for us today…well, the type of reality to which we have become accustomed over the last 100 or so days. It was a real struggle to tear ourselves away from the amazing Driskill Hotel. So much so, that it was 12.45 pm by the time we rolled out of Austin for our 40-mile hop to Wimberley, TX. Hardly an Alpine start … but let us explain.
We decided last night we would order ourselves a healthy continental breakfast to be delivered to the room around 8.15am, by which time, we imagined, we would be showered and dressed, ready to eat and stretch before hitting the road. OK, so the knock on the door at 8.15am woke us up! Not quite as planned. However, we picked up the pace and by around 10.30am we were pretty much ready to go. Having been advised by the bike shop to “pick over our tyres” regularly for bits of glass etc that might cause punctures, we decided that we had better carry out this task before leaving the bike shop Mecca that is Austin. Rather like a couple of monkeys picking fleas off each other, we hovered over Trusty and Steed and marvelled at the number of bits and pieces we were finding stuck in the treads. Perhaps not surprisingly, as we pulled out a particularly large and sharp piece of stone, we heard that familiar hiss that all cyclists hate to hear. Yes, Steed had a puncture. Needless to say, it was around noon by the time we left the hotel and, by the time we had taken a couple of photos of the Capitol Building and run a couple of errands it was 12.45pm…oh well.
We felt good, though, as we pedalled off. Anthony looked rather splendid in his new WWF-style bib shorts (only Kat gets to see the bib bit), and Kat in her new “Sugar Pants” – long shorts that stop just below the knees…some might know these as “pedal-pushers” but that would just be a bit too accurate to sound cool. Kat was also ecstatic to be wearing a rather flash new pair of Oakleys. Having kicked her old pair around the parking lot and scuffed them against the wall as many times as possible in the last few days, she proudly presented them to Anthony and declared that they were “not the sort of thing a lady in her 40s should be required to wear”. Bingo…new shades.
It seemed like a ridiculously short ride, despite the fact that we climbed to over 1100 ft, probably because there was absolutely no wind at all. We suspect that it was also very beautiful, although it was so cloudy it was impossible to tell! So, tonight, we are staying at the lovely Wimberley Inn and are reliably informed that it will start raining overnight and not stop until Friday. Tomorrow will therefore be a soggy 65-mile day over the hills and far away!
Talking of which, we should give you the news that you have all been waiting for... what did Punxsutawney Phil, our cuddly Groundhog, have to say for himself at Gobbler's Knob this morning? Phil proclaimed "As the sky shines bright above me, my shadow I see beside me. So six more weeks of winter it will be." We'll see, Phil, we'll see...
Us x
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