Now that sounds quite bad, but he is only a minute and a half down, and looking at the time gaps, he came in the fourth or fifth group home? Something like that, anyway. He was the last of the RadioLeopards to come home, oops, but he said "Today was not an easy day."
He also said "It’s early in the season so I’m still finding my way in the peloton, but perhaps I will find that I have the legs on tomorrow’s climb.”
Fingers crossed for tomorrow, then!
Meanwhile, in Sunny England:
This is what we encountered on Sunday, at a place called Lathkill Dale: the sign on the way in says "Beware, Mines".
Not the sort that go "Boom!" when you tread on them, but very old lead mines, also known as "holes in the ground".
When walking in this area in the summer, people are advised to keep an eye open for disused mines, ie holes in the ground.
Bit difficult to see them under all this snow!
Yesterday, we bravely ventured up the fields behind the holiday cottage, where no-one had been before, being very careful at the top, where we remembered that there were mines (we've been to this same area several times, so we know it quite well) and using walking poles as useful hole-in-the-ground detectors.
The stile (arrangement for getting over dry stone walls) was completely invisible, but we knew where it ought to be, so we scrambled over the wall in the right place, dropping down the other side into thigh-deep snow drifts.
The snow has drifted up to the top of the wall!
But never mind, we said to each other, we are safe now, we are in the lane, which has walls on each side, and there are bound to have been lots of people walking along it, not like the fields that we have just waded up.
Our mistake.
This is the lane, four feet deep in snow, you can see on the left that the snow has actually drifted up to and over the wall.... and no-one has been along here today.
Did we turn tail and flee?
Did we rush back to our nice warm holiday cottage?
No, we did not, for we are brave Schlecklanders - well, I am a brave Schlecklander, and LLB is always game for a laugh - so we started along the lane.
In some places it was only a foot or more deep, but some of the drifts were well over thigh-height for me, so it was quite an adventure! And then we came across these strange beasts:
Yes, they are reindeer. In England.
Presumably the farmer keeps them for some special reason - I have no idea.
I share this with you so that you know why I don't have much info on what Andy's up to - although I would say, if you have missed it, it's worth checking the newly-renamed RadioLeopard site, they have galleries of photos from the training/team building sessions, and some of those are quite nice. As I only have my little laptop up here, I can't cut-and-paste photos in quite the normal way, so you will have to go and look at them for yourselves.
So, fingers crossed for a good day for Andy tomorrow, in the Tour Down Under, and no more snow for us!
Today, we woke up to find that the snow had stopped, and the sun was trying to shine.
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