Omloop Het Volk & Kuurne Brussel Kuurne 2008 – Day 3 (0)

Sunday dawned bright and clear and it was three refreshed men who headed for Kuurne. This was bike skeking taken to a new level; two-and-a-half hours of it, and it wasn’t enough.

Batavus are an old favourite of ours and their ‘Professional X’ is cool, matt black against a tide of white this year.

We do like those Silence-Lotto Ridleys, the Basso’s of Jartazi are just a tad ‘blingey’ for us, but we like the CA Looks, the AG2R BH’s and the F des J Lapierres.

I had a good blether with Alan Buttler, the Astana mechanic, he’s moved across from Disco with Mr. Bruyneel; “It’s great, we can’t do much racing, thanks to ASO, but it’s a sound set-up.”

Omloop Het Volk & Kuurne Brussel Kuurne 2008 – Day 2 (0)

Getting to Flanders yesterday was painful – a two hour delay at Prestwick, then a battle through the rush hour traffic on the Brussels ring road.

Dave and I are getting good at indiscriminate lane changing and not indicating, but we really have to brush up on our tail-gating technique if we want to drive in the authentic Belgian fashion.

The mission for last night was to have a ‘few’ beers with Dirk Van Hove. Dirk gave me a lot of help with my Gary Wiggins tribute and is a mine of information about Belgian racing.

Omloop Het Volk & Kuurne Brussel Kuurne – Day 1 (0)

You know you’re in Belgium, when . . the barman is Iljo Keisse’s dad – and when there are posters for bike races in the loo!

But I’m getting ahead of myself; “live cargo”, that’s how the airlines refer to their passengers.

And that’s how we feel: the flight is two hours late and we’re sitting on the floor at Prestwick Airport, or ‘Glasgow South’ as Ryanair would have it, despite the fact that we’re 50 kilometres from the city on the Clyde.