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After my farewell it was only a matter of about 10 minutes and 3 miles before I had my first cycling incident. I was just getting ready to start up the first notable hill on the way to London when my chain snapped.

Looking back it is nice how composed I was dealing with this, I remember just looking at the broken chain and calmly taking all the bags off the bike, turning it over and then getting the tool kit out to fix it. I had this attitude that this was probably the first of many incidents and that it could have been a whole lot worse. It turned out that my chain only broke 3 times whilst I cycled to Moscow, so it wasn’t an indication of things to come.

I had cycled the route to London a couple of times before during my preparation so it was a nice ride with no surprises and I was looking forward to staying with Martin that night and seeing a few people who hadn’t been able to make my leaving dinner in Milton Keynes.

Had a very nice evening which I mostly remember because Martin spent most of it trying to persuade me that there were carbs in beer and it would be OK for me to drink lots of it before cycling 65 miles the next day. We also went for what would turn out to be my last decent curry for 6 months (the next was Mongolia in October).

Unfortunately I have no photos from the evening or the state of me the next morning, at least not any digital ones and I can’t find the prints that Rich gave me at the moment.

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Other pages.

• London to Belgium
• Belgium
• The Netherlands