(written by Dave)

Well, technically not man down but rather woman down.  Nancy tried to eat as much pizza as I did for dinner last night and paid the price for her efforts later in the evening.  That meant limited sleep and no chance that we were going anywhere this morning.  Not a big deal as we have some days up our sleeve and other than blue skies for the first couple hours, the rest of the day became pretty wet.

The only real issue was our pension being fully booked for the night so we had to change hotels.  We considered moving the city campground as it is only 1.5 from the city centre but Nancy wanted easy access to a toilet.  Ah, the joys of eating strange food every day.  Our pension was kind enough to call around and find us a room in a hotel only 150 meters away.  The hotel is more expensive than the pension but they gave us close to the pension price as a courtesy.  When we checked in, the clerk made it very clear that “he ran a hotel, NOT a pension.”  For the life of us, we can’t figure the difference and for that matter, the pension was actually nicer – bigger room and a few English TV channels.

Moving is not easy as we had to haul everything down from our room, loaded it all on the bikes – including full strapping, walk 150 meters, unload and haul it all back up two flights of stairs.  This is a lot of work but there is just no way to move our junk efficiently without putting it on the bikes.  Be it 150 meters of 150 kilometers, you have to treat it the same.

So, we’ve had a lazy day.  Nancy sleeping.  Me watching the Tour de France with Czech commentary.  That is until there was one hour left to go in the stage when for some reason they switched coverage to some sort of track meet (who does that, everyone knows that the last hour is most important hour in a stage?).  Anyway, like I said, a lazy day.

With nothing much else to do, I cleaned up a few data files on the computer today.  There will be some readers who care very little about it but I have now mapped our trip with right and left hand riding and know how many k’s we’ve done on both sides of the road.  I know, what an exciting revelation!

Before reading on, take a guess which side of the road where we’ve spent the most time.  We’ve ridden now in 19 countries.  Only four of them had left-hand drive.  The countries table below gives you the countries in the order we’ve ridden and the distances in each country.

Same table but with L or R by country.

And now for the answer:

If you are still with me, congratulations, you may have some data nerd genes in your family tree.  With about 800k to go before we reach Sweden, we’ll be pretty darn close to 50/50 in terms of riding when we take our next long break.  We don’t really have a preference for right or left and have little trouble switching back and forth.  We have to switch our helmet mirrors to the other side but I’ve kept mounts on both sides of my helmet to make this easy – I ran out of mounts or I would have done this with Nancy’s as well.

So, if Nancy’s improvement today continues, tomorrow we head off towards Prague – two days to get there.  And I’ll spend all my extra energy riding (on the right) rather than being a data nerd.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.