Normandy raid - Saturday

After a hesitant start on Friday, our team "Les Genoux Mouxx" got down to action on Saturday and showed the others what we were made of. Well almost ...

After breakfast at 7:00am and following what amounted to just over 5 hours sleep, we were on top form for a full day of events. Not.

First off was mountain biking using a map to guide us over the 12 km course. Anne's chain snapped before we set off, so it was my turn to impress everybody with my cycle repair skills and a new course record of 10 minutes to refit the chain. The MTB course was over fairly quickly thanks to Nick's map reading skills and it was down to the river for the next activity: canoeing.

Laurence and I got in our 2 man canoe following Nick and Anne down the river. We very quickly realised that we wouldn't be finishing first in this event. I sat at the front paddling for all my might and Laurence sat behind with responsibility for steering and keeping the back end in line. This role proved a little too much for Laurence whose boat skills are on a par with my knitting skills. After our fifth time of heading down the river backwards, I'd had enough and was ready for a divorce. Laurence had had enough too. My frantic paddling had sent waves of water over her and her lips had turned blue with the cold. One last stretch of white water and we'd finished the course and just had to drag the canoe out of the water. We'll need to practise our canoeing skills for next year.

It was with much relief that we were handed a map with 3 checkpoints on that had to be found back to the canoe start point. A nice run by all of the team and apart from a minor map reading error by yours truly, we made it back to the start in good time, overtaking another team along the way.

Lunch was a long affair, since we had to wait almost 2 hours before the last 2 teams made it back, having got seriously lost on the way. Back on the bikes again and a 10 km ride through some of the muddiest paths ever encountered. Morale in the team was low now, through lack of sleep and general exhaustion. We arrived at the final checkpoint to be given a list of instructions to find the next 3 checkpoints over a 1 km course.

Here precision was the name of the game: good compass bearings and measurement of the distances meant that the CP's could be found easily. However, after a first false start in our measuring skills, we quickly got the hang of this and posted a good time.

Back on the bikes and a final 7 km ride back to Orbec. We had all had enough by now but Laurence particularly was struggling both up and down the hills. A complaint from her that I wasn't doing enough to help almost provoked the second divorce of the day but our patience had grown thin by then and the outburst was understandable. We struggled down the final hill and checked in, finishing for the day.

The final test was still to come though as when we got back to the campsite, the hot water had run out and we had to take a cold shower.