18:00
On the bus to Edinburgh airport.  Elly slightly nervous, Bruce empty in head and tum.

More updates as and when…

18:57
Bollocks! Our 19:40 flight to Heathrow is delayed until 23:00 because the plane is stuck in Manchester. Our flight from Heathrow to Vienna is at  09:15 tomorrow so we’re not going to get much sleep. A good start for a cycling holiday.

Plane took off about 22:50, so we landed in Heathrow about 23:50. Baggage collection was relatively painless but then we found buses to our hotel (terminal 5 Hilton) had finished for the night. The taxi queue moved very slowly: there seemed to be a lot of haggling going on for each set of passengers. We found out why when told our hotel was out of the taxi drivers’ area: they wanted to charge £35. In the end we accepted this but had I been on my own I’d have walked rather than pay £6 per mile!

It’s now 01:38 and we have to get up at 06:15. Bollocks on a shitty stick.

For shaggy-dog-story reasons, I ended up sheltering from pissing rain for over an hour. My mood was lightened a lot by receiving a card from the children on the cycling skills course.

We’ve just done the Sunday Beast: 90 minutes of spinning at medium-hard to hard spinning, finishing with very hard 10-minute sprint. Oddly, I feel much less knackered than after most evening 60-minute sessions. I think it’s possibly because it called for continuity rather than madness – staying in the saddle and pushing, building up resistance and cadence, then coming out of the saddle for extra effort-requirement.

Also, there were very few jumps, and none were less then 8 revolutions out of the saddle, interspersed with 8 in. (Evening sessions tend have groups of 8, immediately followed by groups of 4 then groups of 2, so you’re bobbing up and down like an Essex-girl’s scanties. Also they’re to ridden to much faster beats and more emotionally intense music.)

I should admit I couldn’t achieve the cadences the instructor and other class-members did but they seem to be all serious roadies.The only ill effects I can feel are my left elbow is very painful (but that’s due to my ongoing shoulder problems) and my upper back feels taut. A hot bath should cure those.

I had been dreading this session but I’m slightly disappointed that I won’t be there next week (we’re on holiday in Austria, cycling from Passau to Vienna along the banks of the Danube) to give this session the effort it truly deserves.

I’d been moaning about my TiBook’s screen not working, due to me dropping it during a trip to Worcester. A quick bit of surgery (thanks to Bruce J and iFixit) and it’s back to normal. It turns out the ribbon cable connecting the motherboard to the inverter had come loose.

Doing more literature-review for summer project, currently concentrating on use of internet by nordic municipalities (smallest units of local government). Smallest might be a misnomer: Oslo municipality has 530,000 citizens while Utsira island has 213. (i.e. Oslo seems not to be divided into smaller units, unlike scottish community councils which cover districts/neighbourhoods/areas of cities and counties or complete islands such as Arran.)

Anyway, I came across this which frightens me shitless!

1. To Napier
2. From Napier to hospital for routine check-up
3. Back to Napier

The government says I’m safe to work with children. The only flaw is this arrived about a month after I’d finished doing so.

Finally got to Napier to do some work. Here’s today’s cycling map

To see what I mean, download this.

Cos these need to be public!

• 2012_06_14: centre of Worcester to home in the rain
• 2012_06_14: home to centre of Worcester
• 2012_06_13: home to centre of Worcester
• 2012_06_13: home to centre of Worcester
• 2012_06_12: post-hospital destress: home to Hallow to Broadheath to home
• 2012_06_12: hallow post office to home