May 7, 2005 — After waiting and waiting for May 5th – our departure date – it’s finally here… we’ve arrived in Europe. It was a pretty late flight leaving at 4 pm from Toronto and arriving in London, England to race the Lincoln GP at 4am, with 0 hours of sleep on the plane. We get off the plane and then it was a 4-hour drive to Lincoln, so we did a bit of traveling.

We did not do much our first day, still recovering from the travel, just a much needed nap and an hour spin in the countryside. Today we went into Lincoln to pre-ride the course. A steep cobbled climb in town, about 350 metres long, passing between an old cathedral and castle, makes this a really cool course. The rest is flat, with one other small climb and many turns. It’ll be an exciting course to race on. At 102 miles, 13 times up the climb which will be pretty tough, but I think that it’ll be tough but we will manage.

After this we are off to Belgium for 10 days to do some racing and then we are headed for the FBD Insurance Ras in Ireland, which should also be a very cool race.