We woke up early, headed down for breakfast and then loaded up the coaches with all our luggage and transfered to our next hotel and the place we'd start cycling from, Playa Giron (the famous Bay of Pigs - so named because of the numerous wild boar that roam about in the area).
Heading along the motorway from Havana was a very strange experience as it was pretty rare to see any other vehicles on the road so soon we were getting quite animated if we spotted a truck in the distance. We stopped off about half way at a little motorway services place where you could buy drinks and a few soveniors...
We all got pur camera's out as we got closer to Playa Giron as it was our first glimpse of the sea so we were all spapping away through the windows...
As we pulled into the hotel, we had our very first glimpse of the bikes we would be riding - they looked pretty impressive from a distance.
When we arrived at our hotel we were greated with mojitos and some dancing girls - very nice too! We had a bit of time to check in, find our cabin (here we stayed in individual lil houses dotted about the place - they were basic but fine, no wildlife in our new home although the same couldn't be said for others - some had frogs and cockroaches, we were lucky) and drop off our bags before we had to be back for our bike fitting!!!
The bike fitting was pretty frustrating as it took soooooo long but to be fair to the organisers, there were a lot of us and they tried their best to accomadate everyone's preferences. We'd brought along our own saddles and handlebar grips complete with bar-ends and this caused some confusion with the mechanics assigned to sorting out our bikes for us as they'd never seen them before and somehow managed to take them to bits and put them on in a really weird way! Luckily for us, Val had her little bike allenkey tool (mine was confiscated as a deadly weapon en route to Paris) and we were able to put them back together and refit them. Once we'd done this we had to get our helmets before we were allowed to test out our bikes (Health and Safety rules). Val's seemed to work okay despite the handlebars being lower than she was used to but mine seemed to have problems with the gears so I had to see the mechanics again while she headed back to have a dip. Sorting my gears took forever but finally they were sorted and I too headed for a dip! Sadly all the faffing about with the bikes meant that we weren't able to visit the Bay of Pigs Museum...
The first injury of the trip occured seconds before this next pic was taken - the beautiful view distracted me and I sliced my toe on a piece of coral. There was a bit of blood but the heat soon dried it up ;)
At this evening's briefing we heard that that Professor Robert Winston will be jetting in later tonight and that he'll be joining us for our first day of cycling. Can't wait!!!
