Well I finally biked to the Cape from Port Elizabeth! Even arriving in time to do 101 km of The Argus Cape Event, dropping in as a laggard and racing to prevent the broom wagon from catching me.<\/p>\n
I had a very pleasurable rest day in Stellenbosch with Keith, whilst Irma went to a spa day day with her daughters :-). I managed to get a mirror for the bike and even fix it to my butterfly handlebars with the help of a clamp from my Cateye light. So hopefully no surprise trucks now!<\/p>\n
The biggest discovery was the new Specialized Concept Store<\/a> just around the corner from where I was staying. The store is actually owned by Specialized USA. This store comes complete with a creche area, outdoor kiddies track, MTB test track, workshop and The Cave cafe area. Cycles are displayed rather than grouped en-masse so it provides a much better experience. I also had the pleasure of chatting to Bobby\u00a0who is Mr Specialized SA. Overall an excellent concept\u00a0\u00a0and many thanks to the\u00a0young technician who fixed my squeaky brakes and front derailleur \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I left for Cape Town early on Sunday down the deserted 12 highway (apart from loads of runners) straight past the airport and it’s townships and on to Newlands where I had booked into The Mantra, arriving the place looked deserted and there was no reply to the bells so I emailed them and pedalled on for a look around the area.<\/p>\n I bumped into a guy who was carrying his bike having had a mechanical, he pointed to the motorway and said it was The Argus<\/a>\u00a0(Apparently the world’s largest timed cycle event over 35,000 riders). So I pedalled up onto the motorway where some other guy on a moped said did I want a push up the hill as the broom wagon was just behind, I declined, but then I saw the 101km marker and thought I might give it a go as I could always get a lift back \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Argus is a fabulous ride down the very hilly Cape peninsular and back the other side. Every hill I came to loads of folks were walking up so I kept going until the bus was a good 30mins behind me. I did 63.2 miles of The Argus at an average of over 12mph, not bad considering I had all my baggage and had just cycled the 29 miles from Stellenbosch plus all those hills. Strava <\/a>says over 7,000 feet of them! All done on a couple of rusks and loads of the Powerade drinks (they filled my bottle in less than a second \ud83d\ude42 Unfortunately being a straggler all the food had disappeared \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n Great fun especially all the comments about bringing the kitchen sink!<\/p>\n I had an awful nights sleep at The Mantra as at 1.30am there was a commotion outside followed by someone having a shower \ud83d\ude41 I left in the morning ans spent most of Monday snoozing at Altona Lodge a real b&b in the town centre.<\/p>\n My pics of Stellenbosch<\/a> and Argus Tour<\/a> plus a few hours in Cape Town harbour<\/a> can be found by clicking the relevant links.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well I finally biked to the Cape from Port Elizabeth! Even arriving in time to do 101 km of The Argus Cape Event, dropping in as a laggard and racing to prevent the broom wagon from catching me. I had a very pleasurable rest day in Stellenbosch with Keith, whilst Irma went to a spa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-biking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsite.geoffjones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}