Belgium Trip Day 3 and 4

Sorry it has taken me so long to post another blog post. I just really have not had the time to get on a computer and write about this trip. I have to try and make this one short because I'm about to go ahead and turn in.

Day 3

Nothing all that special happened today. We all woke up at around 8:30 to eat some breakfast. Mine consisted of some toast with some tasty Nutella, kinda like chocolate peanut butter, and a few apples. After we all finished our breakfasts we set out for an easy hour and a half ride with ride leader Yoghi (sp...) aka Yoshi...the son of Erly, the junior coach of Tom Boonen (......) and Stijn Devolder. After cruising around for over an hour that included riding to Wevelgem (sp?) where I ended up winning the sprint (watch out Oscar Freire!) at the same finish line that the pros use, we headed back to the house to make some lunch. When we had all finished lunch we had a quick meeting with Tim, saying that we would go back out at around 5-ish for "Cycling School". With a few hours to waste we decided to take out the crappy cruiser bikes and go tour around town. When we stopped at the bank so I could add a few Euros to my current 8.50 that would have had to last me the entire trip. When I slid my bank card in and punched in all the numbers the stupid machine ate the card and wouldn't give it back to me. After a conversation with the bank lady that consisted with a ton of sign language she finally realized what I was talking about and went into the back to retrieve my card. We left that bank and headed to another one that ended the same way. When this had happened I whipped out my phone and called my mom. She ended up having to call Bank of America and was told that my card had been shut down for some weird stupid reason and that they would re-open it for me. To make a long story short I ended up having to go back to the bank by myself and was finally able to get some money from the machine. When I left the bank I ended up getting lost for a good 20 minutes because all of the stupid roads look alike... When I finally found my way back to the house I immediately wolfed down some dinner and went to bed upstairs. Also, we didn't do that thing at around 5-ish because it had started to rain kinda hard.

Day 4

Today was pretty much the same routine as the day before. We woke up at around 8:30 and had some breakfast. We left for the ride this time without "Yoshi", so it was only the six of us. We rode out to some random town that was bout 30 minutes away and turned around to head back to Izegem. When we arrived back at the house we had another meeting with Tim and we were going to try and do the same thing that we had tried to do yesterday. We then rode into town again and ate at a sandwich shop before we came back to the house and chilled for a few hours. We then ate an extremely early dinner so we could head out to the 1K course that we would practice water bottle feeding, Musette grabbing, Slaloming, and Motor-Pacing. I can only describe this with one word, superduperextremelyfun. When we were riding back to the house I tried to do a U-turn and had a little slip on some sand where I opened up my scab from my crash a few days ago. (I haven't even told my parents about this. Sorry Mom and Dad!! I haven't really had any time to call you!) After a quick shower I walked downstairs to clean up my share of the kitchen, which consisted of about 300 water bottles and the drying and putting up all the pots. Geez, I will never complain about doing the dishes at home anymore, anything compared to this 1.5 hours of work is considered easy in my books. With my hands raw from doing all those dishes and writing about my day I think I'm looking forward to climbing up the ladder to the top bunk and crawling into my nice and cozy bed.

Happy 4th of July!!!!! And don't forget, the Tour starts tomorrow!! Yay!

Lawson