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Dit zijn de afstanden die er per dag gefietst zijn. Dag 4 was de rustdag.Dag 5 en 6 waren de dagen dat we rond hebben gereden in de Veluwe zonder bagage.
BramTeunissen.com
Day 5 : The transition stage
There was no one at the campsite to collect the money, so we just left. When we were some distance away, a lady started screaming to someone that we were leaving. We decided to keep going, they should've made things clearer. We bought some food and had breakfast in the village. The route continued over small roads. There weren't any real hills, just many short climbs about 500 meters long. The weather was nice, but it got seriously hot later in the day. I was cycling with cleats, but one shoe wouldn't click in the pedal anymore. It turned out that one screw had fallen out. I tightened the remaining screw as much as possible, which helped it stay in place for the remainder of the day
After 40 kilometers, Bram's bike chain seemed to have fallen off the gear. It turned out to be even worse. His chain was stuck between the smallest and middle sprocket. We couldn't get it out, so we had to unscrew the middle sprocket. When everything was fixed we continued. Five hundred meters further the same thing happened again. It turned out that the smallest sprocket had been loose the entire time. The screws had come out because of all the climbing. We had a pretty big problem because the screws could only be reached by removing the entire crank.
A man and woman passed by on a speed bike. They asked, 'c'est bon?' is everything all right? I said we weren't sure. They stopped to see if they could help. They asked 'Parlez vous Anglais?' if I spoke English. I said 'ou', yes. Because I answered in French, they continued in French until she said something in English to her husband. In English, Bram said he couldn't reach the screws on his bike. Then the lady laughed, 'why didn't you tell us you speak English?'. The English also didn't have any tools that could help us. They mentioned a bike mechanic, 20 km away, that would be able to help us and continued. We wanted to avoid making such a long detour. Eventually, we succeeded by removing the mudguard of Bram's bike and bending some pieces of metal. We didn't manage to tighten the screws as much as we wanted to, but it worked for now.
We continued through the heat. After a while, Bram saw a snake by the side of the road. When we got closer to take a picture it started hissing and crawled away.
Who knows what kind of snake this is?
We got the answer from Stef:
'It is a green whip snake which is common in France. We encountered two dead ones during our cycling vacation (run over by cars'.
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