What I am doing right now?

Right now, I (Andy) am sitting in the garden of my girlfriend's house in France. I've just realised that one mosquito has bitten me on my neck, elbow and leg which is why I've been furiously scratching.

10 things I love about Extrawheel trailers

1. They are very light (3.5kg)


2. The wheel can be used as a spare.

Shiny New Extrawheel

I got my new Extrawheel trailer this morning. It is the original version. I have noticed some improvements over the one I broke whilst cycling in Austria.

The hood material has been reinforced where it had previously worn through on my old trailer. The frame seems more chunky and the hood is sturdier and integrated better into the frame. There is a reinforcing steel strut where the trailer-bike fork device attaches. This should help to make the frame stiffer with more responsive handling.

Extrawheel

 I am guilty of slating Extrawheel previously in a podcast. I described a problem I had on the trailer as a design error.

It was actually human error. At the start of the trip I massively overloaded the trailer which caused numerous problems. The drybags contained too many bulky objects which meant they stuck out at the sides and caused the trailer hood to rub on the wheel. If I took a sharp corner, the net and bags rubbed on the ground. This is entirely my own fault and due to a lack of experience using the trailer. However, at the time I was pre-occupied with getting used to the travelling to consider this.

Needle in a haystack

This morning I have been digging through the news about Georgia to find some articles which are closer to what I consider to be closer to the truth.

Typing 'real news' into Google I came across a news website which is member supported and do not accept advertising, government or corporate funding. We don't know who the members are but it's got to be a good start. I found the following pieces interesting:

Embattled nations in the Olympics

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ilZCL7D8RFEr-W6z3jGp4e0d6k3wD92KN13O0

These athletes are still competing in the Olympics under very different training conditions to athletes in more luckier nations not affected by the blight of war.

It sends a message of the strength and determination of the human spirit in defiance of bureacracy and destruction wreaked by madmen and governments.

Mixed Feelings

I've been following the news on the situation in Georgia and observing the media frenzy in response to the conflict.  There are hundreds of media channels and I've been watching the news breaking on google.co.uk/news and it snowball over the last ten days.

War

Today Georgia declared a state of war with Russia. Luckily I'd left on the 26th of July to come home to England to surprise my family. I travelled by bus and train. I'm planning to start to travel back towards Georgia on Monday. I hope that by the time I intend to get back to Tbilisi (around the beginning of September) - the situation will have quietened down.

Need Encouragement?

Before Tom and I left on this expedition we spent a lot of time preparing. We created a research website which we named the 'Biki' (based on Wikipedia software).  It contains way more information than you would ever need to leave on a bicycle expedition from choosing a bike down to the last detail, to navigating using the stars.

 We opened it up to public use in November 2007. I thought I would bring it to light again.  The link is: biki.ride-earth.org.uk .  We hope that fellow expeditioners can use the resource and also contribute.

We added a list of inspiring quotes and links to the homepage and here they are again, I think still as poinient as ever: