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Continued from last month

Yesterday’s incident lost us a further 65km from our schedule so
today we are going for a mammoth day of 350km to get us to CP3 at Hotel
Lav in Vukovar, Croatia. It’s a long day 20 hours, but the Croatian roads are
good to us and the petrol stations even better stocked with the largest
array of snacks we could wish for. We make good progress stopping every
50km just to keep mind and soul together.

Today there were 2 incidents. The first happened early in the morning with a
heavy fall by Katie, a moment’s loss of concentration saw her just drop off
the road on to the gravelled edging at the side and then she hit the tarmac.
It was her first ever fall from a bike but dazed and sore she was a trouper
and got back on the bike and pedalled on.

The second saw us riding into a huge electrical storm at night. Initially we
marvelled at the impressive lightning strikes to our right as we rode towards
CP3 but as our route turned us directly into the storm’s path our mood
changed. We were the only objects on a wide open plain with lightening literally
striking the road in front of us lighting up the landscape around us; it was
like being in an action movie. I told Katie not to worry we had rubber tyres, I
am not actually sure that would have saved us but it seemed to reassure
her a little, I was just acutely aware that we had to get off the road as quickly
as possible. As we rode on the wind picked up tremendously, a cross wind, so
that we had to ride leaning hard into it. Finally down came torrential rain. We
decided we couldn’t beat the elements at this point and pulled in to a
perfectly placed corrugated plastic bus shelter. Wrapped in our emergency
silver blankets we sat for an hour and a half waiting for the storm to pass,
we couldn’t even talk to each other the noise inside our shelter was so loud.
So much for making good time, we rolled in to CP3 at around midnight.
Another stamp on our brevet card and off to bed.

Each day Katie set the alarm for 03:30 to ensure that we were
pedalling by 04:00 allowing us on average around 5 hours sleep. Today
thankfully Katie granted us a lie in setting the alarm for 05:00 after

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