Time is closing in

A month from today we will depart on our big cycling tour through west africa leaving from Lac Rose, a small lake 30 km out of Dakar, Senegal. I keep a close eye on the temperatures of some places we will visit and i recon it will be a 'hot' trip! Its still around 38-40C in most places.

So today i received most of my visa, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Togocan be checked off the list. Only one to go now: Ghana, so this will be another return trip to The Hague. It all went nice and quick but its still quit costly.

Other preparations are going smoothly as well and the longchecklist is almost done. Had to buy lots of things such as a new tent ( not to small), sleeping matrass, lots of spare parts for the bike, tires, spokes, medicines and other stuff from the drugstore, first aid kit, extra cycling cloths, mapsetc. etc. Alsoa buff and even my skiing glasses will come with me in case the harmattan, a local sahara sand storm, rears up. yep we will have to be prepared for all sorts of circumstances. Other handy things in that matterare the Iphone app of the SAS survival guide, which we can use in case off emergency (snake bites, broken bones, lack of water, sand storms and other nice things). After some websearching i managed to get some GPX maps of west africa for my GPS, so i wont have to get lost.

But as training is concerned, all the preparations have taken up so much time that cycling hasnt happened a lot lately, to say not at all. I only was able to squeeze ina two to three times a week indoor training and some running. Cycling has to happen in the weekend now that the dark days of autumn have set in, as well as the rain and storms which go with this period of the year. But alsoHilda and the kidswant to see some of me, in the days before departure. So i guess my fitness level will have to improve during the trip...there are plenty of Km's ahead of us to do so.

For now, some two weeks to work, a week off for some more preparations and then off to Africa !