Diary written by: Bernt Pölling-Vocke ( bernty@gmx.com )

There are some things in life one just shouldn´t say out loud. For example that we, being the only guests of our hotel, would get very limited breakfast-supplies. We only got 2 pieces of bread and 2 croissants and when I asked for some more I already joked that we would just get 2 more pieces of bread. Guess what happened (never be the only guest in a hotel where you have to pay in advance when you check in...). I also shouldn´t have said that one of Frank´s spokes is due to break today. Took 25 kilometers to happen...

Frank is sitting right across the table at an italian restaurant in Valence right now and only talking about his wheel, his wheel and his wheel. It seems as if he is rather pissed about being up 5:0 in broken spokes and right now we only have 90 more minutes to kill until a bike-store around the corner opens after the 12:30-14:00 lunch-break. We already were at the store at 12:20 but let´s hope that the owner just went for an early break today and isn´t on a vacation without putting up a sign for potential customers...

At least the pizza here is way better than last night. By the way I just remembered that last night´s 23-gram-pizza was advertised for 3-4 people. If that joke last night was for 3-4 people the pizza here should be enough to feed half of Uganda for a year...

2nd entry of the day:

"It´s all no fun anymore, and if something breaks around here people wait four months until their store opens again or what?", Frank got just pissed more and more throughout the day when the bike-store mentioned above did not open at 2 pm. After that we cycled to a sports-store at a mall which also had a bike department but no fitting rear-tires. At least we were told at that store that there is a big bike-store just outside Valence and right on our route so we cycled there. Somehow it didn´t suprise any of us two that the store was closed as well; Frank got a bit aggressive with the front-door but that was about it.

Just some meters further down the road the mood went south once more when the sixth spoke broke on Frank´s bike. This time it happened while he was pushing the bike backwards at a gas-station and I can still remember him throwing away his helmet and getting angrier than I had ever seen him before. At least I came up with some good ideas just for the case that we wouldn´t find a wheel anywhere. We would just stay in a town for a day or make some hotel reservations for the end of tomorrow´s stage somewhere and his parents would send a new wheel with UPS or something like that to the hotel.

In the end Frank got his act together again and we continued on our route. Frank then noticed that some of the replacement-spokes weren´t attached correctly and so he decided to correct them. When he started working on the wheel the tube also started to loose all air more or less without any visible reason. When shit happens it attracts more of it I guess and so he not only corrected the spokes but also inserted a new tube... It didn´t make any sense to ask for any smiles and I was not allowed to videotape at all, he probably would have killed me if I had tried to do so...

In the end the tire and Frank made it to today´s destination, Montelimar. At the tourist information we were also told that most bike-stores are closed on mondays. France is a strange country I suppose. Anyways, at the moment we are just sitting in our hotel-room watching BBC´s hardtalk about AIDS in South Africa. Earlier we had a nice dinner on the bed and that after the front desk staff informed us that we are not allowed to eat inside the room. I also don´t think that hotels are normally allowed to charge a full-price parking-space when you arrive on a bike so it´s a trade. We pay for the parking and eat in the room, case closed. I just hoped that we will be able to find a new reartire for Frank´s bike somewhere tomorrow because sooner or later it won´t be possible to insert any new spokes due to the fact that the wheel is just too f__cked up by now. In the worst case UPS will need 24 hours to deliver a wheel for 160 marks while the german postal service will charge 200 marks for 48 hours. The longer it takes the more it costs, makes sense...

3rd entry of the day:

It´s rather late right now and some bankers are just whining on NBC that the whole financial world is more or less falling apart with the horrifying stuff that keeps on happening on Wall Street and the world wide stock markets. We also played some chess in the park across the street in front of the hotel and I managed a draw in the 2nd game. My style ticked Frank off big time because I just went on a trading-spree and exchanged all figures I could. I just got tired of loosing and played a bit more destructive than I normally do but nobody expects the Nashville Predators to play an open game against the Dallas Stars as well so he will just have to live with it. I didn´t loose and he wasn´t able to win so who is having a problem here?

Chess statistics:        Bernt vs Frank         1:13:1