Today we’ve had every sort of wind imaginable; head, tail, howling, gusty, side, gusty-side, and far too much gusty-howling-head!
It blew pretty much all through the night and although there was lots of thunder and lightening only a sprinkle of rain at just after 0400 – unfortunately my camping neighbour took that as an indication that it was time to get up and pack up, so a somewhat earlier than necessary awakening.
Packed up, and again we had to wait for it to get lighter before we could leave which took a while this morning as the clouds were blowing through! Andreas has decided to ride today for the first time in the tour and once he left it was clearly time that the rest of us could too.
Stage 89 rider notes
The climb began as soon as we hit the road and at times we had clouds blowing round us. None-the-less it was soon warming up and I’d set out with my raincoat on as it was cold in camp but after 4km that had to come off.
For most of the way up the wind was behind us which meant that we didn’t really notice it, but once we started coming down again it made its presence felt – initially as a head wind before swinging round to be behind us for a while, and then dropping away.
As I came into Shahrud the thunder, lightening and rain started up (so a stop to put on my raincoat), and as I was leaving the wind was coming in directly from the side. For a while I was moving pretty slowly because I was worried about being blown into the fairly heavy, fairly fast-moving traffic.
While I was at lunch that dropped away again giving me about 20km of calm riding, and even the occasional tail wind before the full-force nor-wester (of Canterbury proportions, and just about as hot) hit. Given we were heading west that made things pretty hard going and I was relieved to head into the town of Damghan to get out of the worst of it for a while.
A stop for ice-cream and I saw Grant go past – it would have been good to have gone with him to work the wind together but I still had half an ice-cream to go! The town was pretty nice, with interesting sculptures in the street
At the point I turned right in town I only had 13km to go but it was directly into the wind, and turned out to be uphill – in the end it took just under an hour to cover that distance which is about my slowest riding pace of this entire trip.
Into camp and I was pretty tired and after being blown about for so long extremely grateful to be out of the wind! After some soup I took a wander down to the lake for a swim, a wash, and to wash my cycling kit which after the rain earlier in the day was absolutely filthy – as were the bits of me which had been sticking out!
Significantly cleaner and feeling somewhat revived by that process I got my tent up and spent some time examining my eyelids for flaws. That took almost an hour but I’m pleased to report that all is well.
Dinner, a bit of a wander, a bit of time spent watching Andreas (who chose a particularly unpleasant day to decide to ride) trying to ride the motorcycle of a local chap up a particularly steep gravel hillside, a bit of chatting, and after my early morning and despite my nap, it was time to take myself off to my tent.
I’ve spent the last hour half-in, half-out of my tent listening to some music, as well as the thunder rolling in again, and as the rain has just started to fall it’s time to zip things up and get some sleep.
Riding data
View from my tent
Lake views