Silly Billies Return to Roam

S o here we were again - back in the land of p â tisserie and pain au chocolat for the 2011 world orienteering champs in Aix Les Bains. We spent 3 days in our favorite town of Annecy to begin with - some of the team staying in a little hotel while we camped in a campground across the road. We ran up on two of the WOC training maps - they were super technical. The forest was fairly dense and very rocky underfoot with great big holes hidden by leafy ground everywhere. It took me nearly two hours to do the first training, and I thought I did it ok! Some of the Kiwi team in Annecy after a squeeze-through-the-crowd sprint training Annecy was absolutly packed with summer holidaying Europeans and wasn't quite the utopia we remembered from 2005 when Chris raced here in the Raid Expedition race. On Friday the others drove through to Aix Les Bains, and I cycled via some back roads the 50km between the towns. There were some nice little French villages and farmland along the way. We stayed ...

One-Pan (short for one Emily carrying one pannier on bike) riding in the Swiss Alps After our great trip in Iceland we took a midnight flight across Europe to land in Stuttgart early on Monday morning. We were laden down with bikes and panniers, and 6 train changes later we wearily unloaded our gear onto the streets of Chur, Switzerland. Not long after this young Lovely Lovell-Smith appeared with two wonky panniers and a big grin. The three of us set off up the road to try to find Jamie and Penny at Flims Camping ground. Unfortunately we had a few mishaps along the way - my brake pad finally called it quits- and we got a little lost and ended up down in a huge ravine cycling along a very narrow track beside the railway line. After a big grind out of the ravine we were still looking for Penny and Jamie and their camp ground as the light faded and it became dark. Fireworks started going off around the valley - it turned out it was the Swiss national day. Finally we got hold of Dieter, th...

The ride from the end of the F88 along the ring road to Mývatn was a long and hard one, because we were already tired, a bit hungry, and for the first time in many days we had a head wind - a strong head wind. I drafted Chris as much as I could, but it was hard with the traffic roaring past us and it reinforced in our minds why we didn't cycle on the ring road. After what felt like an eternity of unchanging landscape we finally rounded a corner and could see steam rising in the distance, and hundreds of tiny people wandering over a brightly coloured clay area. Soon we reached the pull-off and parked up our bikes for a good look at some bubbling mud and strange steaming knoll things. Mud pots The bubbling mud was good, but not quite up to Taupo standard in my opinion. We climbed back on our bikes and rode over the last small hill into Mývatn, headed straight for the supermarket. The supermarket seemed amazing and we bought all sorts of things we had been craving - yogurt, nectarine...