Now that it has been whittled down to only four, it’s probably about time to mention the rest of our team.

Albert Finsterwalder is a business associate from EMC – primarily a computer storage company. Think disk drives – Vodacom has about 6 million MB of storage. As with most European sporting types he is an accomplished skier, ski tourer, climber and mountaineer apart from cycling, which around here is really only a summer activity.

We have then met Petr (say Peter) Budis and Jan Rudolph from the Czech Republic. It took us three and a half days to discover that they had only met on the GBI tour – it’s interesting the assumptions one makes. You are both from Czech so you must know each other. And say, do you know Bob? He’s from Czech too – I met him a couple of years ago at a hotel in Prague. As if!

Jan is here with his wife. Sort of. She is riding the shorter Track 1 route so they have hardly seen each other. Again, his main sport is Nordic cross country ski racing. Apparently the sport that places the highest demands on the bodies aerobic systems. Cycling is just a sideshow really. He says to support his eating habit in summer!

Petr has a day job too, but he is one of Czech’s top Iron Man competitors. The top swimmer but “only” third or so best on the bike leg. In the country! And also a European swimming champion albeit 20 years ago. He has the genetics that make it tough to benchmark oneself against.

So the upshot of it all is that we have had some pretty good hard cycling. We are averaging around 30kph each day, which may not be particularly high, but that includes traversing the cities and villages. For example this morning we took almost and hour to move 10km through Hamburg. On the flat we move at between 42kph and 45kph with Petr or myself in front. including the gentle headwind. But that’s the story for another blog.

Petr leads the way through some of the best road biking tack and scenery I have ever ridden