A slight decline

As I expected, I've picked up Jono's cold. Or someone's cold...those press rooms are lethal. So I'm a bit under the weather, but not too much. This is OK because the weather's a bit under the weather too. Rain, wind, 7 degrees for the next four days and beyond, it looks like. I doubt I'll be getting on the bike a lot.

I finally managed to inveigle a full day off on Tuesday, which was great. In the arvo, Jon and I wandered into town and acquired various useful items, including lunch at a very good but utterly deserted French boulangerie. A digital dictaphone that doesn't play at 120% of normal speed was also on the shopping list, and now I have no excuse for "losing" finish line quotes.

But the piece de resistance was a fully wireless setup for my laptop: a PCMCIA card that can hook into any wireless network that's available, and apparently there's one across the street that Jono's been using. But I got my own box too, which I could plug straight into the ADSL phone socket in the wall. This is so cool - I can now work from the couch or in bed.

Configuring said wireless network was done while utterly inebriated between 12:30-1:30 am on Tuesday night. Don't ask me why, but it had to be done. After our shopping expedition, we had hooked up with Lucy Power and her bro Pete, who were visiting from the UK to see all the races this week. We started at a cafe on the Graslei and when that closed, we went to a funny little cafe/restaurant near the Vridagmaarkt called "Mosquito Coast" or something. Many beers and some decent food followed, and a great time was had by all. Obviously, after that was the best time to install the wireless network on my PC.

Gent-Wevelgem yesterday - another busy day. Excellent finish though, and Mattan deserved that win. He wound it up to 60 km/h way before he got behind the cars to close the five second gap to Flecha in the last 600m. The "neutral car" shouldn't have been there, but it definitely didn't provide Mattan with any real assistance.

To cap it all off, I had a foot long chicken kebab from the Doner Kebab place down the road. I wanted it with frites, and the guy just stuck everything in the kebab, with heaps of special garlic mayo. I was so hungry before eating it, but bloody hell it took some getting through. Now I know how Elvis used to feel.