10th June 2016 Missed by a hare's breadth!

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Friday 10th 60-68F, 16-20C, light winds and sunny. Walked only a couple of miles. Rest day from the trike.

The hare which lolloped hundreds of yards to have its picture taken and then ran all the way back again. Exactly the same thing happened last year in exactly the same place. My Lumix TZ7 camera seem to be getting much slower to reset after every exposure. Making it much more difficult to capture moving targets.

Saturday 11th 60-64F,  16-18C, quite breezy from the north-east. Just another short, two mile walk.

Fyen Rundt

Then I rode to some slightly more distant shops. Hundreds of cyclists going the other way on the first leg. They were competing in the Fyn Round an annual event for racing bikes over four ride lengths: 333km, 180km, 110km and 65km. Which goes to show how out of touch the council supervisor was in importing enough gravel and glass for the cycle paths to ballast a Mærsk supertanker! They were road racing bikes. Not MTB's, you blithering idiot! So they didn't need your efforts to make them feel at home on loose, flinty, gravel track with decorative glass. Needless to say there were plenty of cyclists stopping to mend punctures.

How much would it have cost to bring in a road sweeping vehicle just once this year? Silly question, when financial priorities are on buying an enormous fleet of American fighter aircraft. Just to guarantee a top NATO job for the Danish prime minister when he's finally thrown out. Been there, done that. Any remaining funds must go to the purchase of original Danish, modern "art" daubs and impractical, Danish architect designed furniture for the local council offices. Billions in returned taxation is given away to any foreign businessman who ask for it.

On the way back from the shops I was now riding with the cyclists. With hundreds of mixed ability cyclists spread out across miles of road in groups of all sizes and many riding solo of course. There was no other obvious way to get home via the next lot of shops and the roads were open to normal traffic anyway. The average speed of the peloton which overtook me was about 19mph but I was only managing 17-18 riding solo being heavily laden with shopping by then. I seemed to match the group ahead on the hills but then I hadn't ridden far compared with them. I waved one chap on as he came up behind me but he was glad for somebody else to do all the work into the wind for a while. 

Highlights of the day included an immature [sub-14years old] raving fuckwit driving past literally hundreds of cyclists at over 80mph with his engine screaming in a 60kph/ 40mph speed limit. No police + no cameras = no road crime in Denmark.

Impatient drivers were also getting completely tangled up between groups of riders without much chance of overtaking again because of so much oncoming Saturday traffic and frequent blind bends. Some cyclists were getting so fed up with these moronic drivers that they were overtaking these slow cars to rejoin the group ahead.

Later a car drove down the outside of a long string of cyclists while blasting his horn continuously. I have no idea if he was mentally deranged but knew lots of the riders. The latter seems very unlikely. Or he was mentally handicapped and expressing his outrage at being slightly baulked in a busy shopping village. One where he usually prefers to exceed the legal speed limit past the open, junior school playground. All good fun then, except for the [specially laid on] glass and gravel. But, hey, this is a cycling-friendly country and the ride is only once a year after all! It's not all bad though. I suppose I can look forward to clear cycle paths once Mærsk has collected their misplaced tons of gravel for ships ballast. 14 miles.

Sunday 12th 60F, 16C, light to stiff breeze, sunny. It is supposed to be cloudy with rain so I shall be seeking compensation for hurt feelings from those responsible for all this sunshine. Any information leading to a prosecution will be very welcome. We are having a bit of a drought over most of Denmark according to the DMI. A recycling center caught fire when garden waste, woody stuff was ignited by sparks from the shovel of a digger used to tidy it up.

With fields usually cultivated right up to the property line of rural homes and businesses a fire in the crops could be very serious indeed. It's no wonder they retain so many fire ponds. A recent combine harvester fire set the grain crop alight around a small house. It [the fire] was finally brought under control by a farmer with a tractor who turned the crop into the ground to stop the fire from spreading further. I remember a similar fire in a field right beside a farm from a similar machine fire. There are still huge numbers of thatched, rural houses.

It used to be commonplace for farmers to burn the stubble after the harvest but that seems to have died down. One chap who used to burn his fields regularly spread smoke over at least ten miles when the wind conditions were perfect. We were choking at home so I went to see what was causing all the smoke. Great pillars of black smoke rising in the landscape used to be a daily sight in summer. With great dollops of Roundup to clean the ground and contaminate the water supply it hardly seems necessary to choke the fields' neighbours these days. We have a new, private source of smoke amongst our neighbors and have just had to close all the windows.

Click on any image for an enlargement. 

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