At ten to ten, Derk is rowing. Also today quite a lot of climbing, but again much less heavy than Derk is used to. By the way, after tomorrow it will completely stop rising. To say that a lot has happened today... The surroundings were nice again, but roughly the same as yesterday.
Good news about Derk's painful foot: it is already a lot less painful. Any normal person should take a week off with something like this, but Derk just rows the problem away.
After ten hours of rowing, with an average of 26.8 km/h and a maximum of 70.9 km/h, it’s done for today. The endpoint is Tullo, which is not that far from tomorrow's starting point, Brive la Gaillarde. Early in the evening, Derk steps out of the ambulance (still sounds strange), accompanied by Caroleen and Kees. Rianne and the undersigned have completely prepared the camper at the local campsite.
By the way, the campsite turns out to be a bad choice. Busy road next to it, barking dogs for hours, noisy people, transistor radios, everything seems to have been thought of to give us an unsettled evening and a restless night.
Good news about the jam Derk had during the descent at 50 km/h. Derk is feverishly checking his hubs under the awning of the camper because he doesn’t feel like having another jam. However, when we started reasoning, we came to the conclusion that the hub couldn’t have blocked at all. Initially, Derk thought that a nut holding the industrial bearing at the back in place had come loose and had then spun into the hub. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out that the nut couldn't block the hub at all.
In the end, we figured out it was a broken quick release. This caused the wheel to go askew and block against the V-brake (the brake was also bent). We knew of course that the quick release was broken but initially thought that it happened as a result of the axle blocking. The breaking of the quick release is probably due to it being overtightened. Tip: don’t tighten your quick release too tight (also not too loose). In any case, the hub doesn’t need to go back to the drawing board.
*Bollen is supposedly Flemish for “to ride”. In any case, the available Rowingbike tour volunteers use the word all day long, so I can't fall behind.