- ODO 628km
- Location REVAL48 – Railway come cycleway in Germany
- Weather 12-27℃ Stormy showers into the evening
- Feelings High spirits listening to music.
This morning in Belgium and experienced the Netherlands and Germany before following the German/Belgian border. The Belgian roads have been the best but this afternoon, while climbing my first 500m hill alongside a highway was tough. I’m more tired today than I thought I’d be at this point. I’m going to try and get a nap in at lunch to make up for it.
Towards the end of the day I switched off the highway onto an amazing old railway which is now a 100km cycle track. Half way to my campsite for the net I met Veronika & Matthias with their two kids in the trailer behind the bikes. We shared a few biscuits and a few stories of their 4 year trip together as we sheltered from a passing storm in and old train car parked up alongside the path.
One of stories Mit told me a few night before was of the effects of lime disease from a tick bite she received. She’d even go so far as to gift me a small plastic device to remove them. Laying reading my phone, a black tick crawls plane across the screen. I tried to crush it with a guide book but it turns out they are really tough bastards. Then in a panic I tried to unzip the tent to throw it out. But in fumbling with the zip managed to loose it entirely in the darkess. I spent the next half a hour emptying, examining and shaking out every piece of clothing and kit one by one, including the bivy itself. Exhausted I lay back down. As I rolled over to go to sleep, after reading a few more pages of Jace Clayton’s Uprooted, there it was, crawling across my orange roll mat. This time I managed to get it onto the edge of the owners manual for the tent, managed to open the zip first time and fling it out into the tent to a sigh of relief.
I hope there was only one.
