Showing Off.

Having arrived safely arrived at the event HQ I had a quick drink at the social club (for a few days anyone involved in the race is an honorary member, I suspect that you qualify by walking in through the door) and then set up camp. The tent is rather large, but then I do like my comforts and there is room in it for the trike as well; gone are the days when I would sleep in the back of a van with the trike padlocked to the towing eye. The instructions say that it takes two men(?) an hour to erect, they’re probably the same men that wrote the instructions; it can be done comfortably by one person in about twenty minutes. Inflating the self-inflating airbed takes nearly as long and every year I make a mental note to buy an adapter so that I can blow it up with the stirrup pump; but, then again, perhaps I should write it down on a piece of paper.
 
Cleopatra’s, a favourite haunt of the local cyclists, is now open until 11 pm so I wandered along for an evening meal. I'm posting this a week after the event so I have no idea what I ate but they did advertise Irish coffee (made with Scotch whisky?), I would have preferred a liqueur to whisky but the lad who served me was under the delusion that they couldn’t accommodate my taste; the lad also needed some instruction on the techniques involved in the preparation of such a beverage but, apart from that, the meal was good – whatever it was.
 

On the way back, I came across another lad simply messing about on the river in his sawn off canoe. Having informed me that he had absolutely no objection to me taking a few photographs, he started behaving very erratically and I had no choice but to use continuous drive and rattle off a few dozen pictures. I shot quite a few at a slow shutter speed before correcting my error, but then found that the early ones were quite satisfactory. The extra is one of the later pictures taken just as he is coming up for air. When I left ten minutes later, he was happily birling round –completely lost in his own little world – so I have no idea who he was or what he was trying to achieve; he might have been training for Olympic glory in some extreme sport of which I am totally unaware.