Day 6 - Christaina to Kimberley
The second shortest day of the Tour arrive with another reasonably late rise for us this morning, only after 5am! We had breakfast at 06h15 and everybody was told before hand that we will leave at 07h00 sharp as we had time schedules to stick to when we meet the press and Miss SA at the Flamingo Casino.
We had about 120 kilometers to get into Kimberly to the Flamingo Casino where we would spend the night and the team were really flying to get their quickly. The road surface along the first stretch of 50 kilometers was terrible and we had a total of 8 punctures from hitting stones, potholes and all sorts of obstacles in this short distance. Once we had got through this section and entered into the Northern Cape shortly before Warrenton things changed as the pace picked up considerably with speeds of up to 48km/h on the flat sections with the wind in our backs!
The Germans with Reiner, Toni, Ingo, Marcus and Richard put in some hard sessions which was followed by Terence and Johann. Some of the slower riders took strain however Ernest managed to control the ride nicely from the second row!
We arrived at the hotel too early and decided to pull into the Shell garage across the road to prepare our recovery drinks and stretch while we waited for the 11h00 official welcome at the Casino. We were met by the General Manager, Peter Guthrie and staff at Flamingo shortly after 11h00, accompanied by Nicole Flint, Miss South Africa who had flown in to meet us all and representatives from the various charities.
After the outside photo session we went through to the function rooms and handed over two cheques of R 10,000 each to the two different charities supported by the Flamingo to the very grateful beneficiaries. A finger lunch had been prepared for the riders who made sure that not a morsel was wasted and then later moved on to the hotel to check and spend the remainder of the afternoon at leisure.
During the speeches Nicole stated that in 2011 she will be joining the team on the Tour to Cape Town! Johann reminded her that the team will held her to her promise in 2011; in fact she stated she will ride with Terence on a tandem in 2011. Something to look forward too!!
Once again the entire Hotel foyer was taken up by the cyclists and physios where the normal assessments and injuries were attended too. The evening meeting was held at 17h00 in the hotel foyer with the dinner at Squires to follow directly thereafter. Nicole joined the team for dinner and she slotted in very nicely, she become part of this awesome team!
The awards for the day for support and rider were handed out with Ilke taking the award for bringing such energy to the tour and the jersey for the best rider was held over until later as there were no stand out performances for the day, all performed equally well as it was a relatively short ride!
It was straight to bed again after the dinner at Squires as the start the next morning would be extremely early AGAIN as the next few days will test the riders with aces and pains, sore bums and injuries now starts to appear!