It was a dishcloth morning: damp, grey, cold, with recent ones unsettlingly indistinguishable from much older ones. Anyway, untrafficked and unfenced lanes trickled their way through farmland and woods, up and then down, flat and then down and then up. At times I felt stranded in some sort of eternally repeating GIF.
Not unpleasantly, though. I was enjoying the moist, meandering quality of it all, and had to keep blinking to remind myself I wasn’t in some sidelined part of Bavaria. But then I have to keep blinking anyway, because my failing eyes don’t work as well as they used to. See the world while you can! Literally.
I perked up on a series of long, easy downhills, and wrote books in my head. I perked up further when we stopped at a bench in the town of Tišnov for a lunch garnered from its Tesco.
Then I perked down, as the chicken nuggets sandwich allied itself with the still-undefeated mussels from Prague, and made me queasy and nauseous again.
I rode gamely on. Roads, castles, lanes, lakesides, climbs, descents, roads, repeat ad nauseam, which I was.
We got into Brno. While paying more attention to my stomach than the bike path, I nearly collided with one of the many big middle-aged men in mountain bike gear riding e-MTBs coming very fast the other way occupying most of the width.
Roadworks made a nonsense of Nigel’s meticulously planned route into town, but a friendly local with excellent English helped us. Isn’t it embarrassing how good foreigners are at speaking our language? Then we realised he was Australian.
I was exhausted and ill and really wanted to go to bed – it wasn’t even four o’clock – but I wanted to see somthing of Brno. So I shuffled out with Nigel to see at least something of Czechia’s second city, even if only trams and a bar. I couldn’t face anything to eat, and – this tells you how bad I was – I only had a quarter of my beer.
I must feel better tomorrow. Surely?
Miles today: 46
Miles since Cheb: 272