Week one down.

So, week one down, 11 to go till I come home, 12 till National Champs. Training has been limited to a couple of street rides followed by beers and local food, as well as hauling alot, and I mean a f^$king lot of rock. It is however leading to one amazing track and one which will certainly stand apart from anything else in the area. Last weekend we were supposed to be heading through to Sintra to do some dh shuttles but unfortunately at 5am friday morning the bob sled( transit van with stuffed battery) decided to destroy it's oil pump leaving a rather large slick running down the car park and back up into it's park. Then or Portuguese house mate went and tore the sump out of his van on a manhole cover while trying to rally through some roadworks.

This week has been one which truly tries your patience. One that if you didn't laugh you would probably have a serious problem on your hands, digging for 9hrs 4 days in a row in the pouring rain for instance. Waiting for your stuff to arrive only to find it's gone to the wrong address and they are on holiday for the next three weeks. Gotta love this place. On the plus side food and alcohol are very cheap the countryside is amazing, the other day we climbed a few hundred stairs to reach an old church at the top just so we could ride down again.

The people here are hilarious, the don't smile, look at or even acknowledge you, so it has become our mission to make them by waving, smiling and saying hello to everyone( though in portuguese) and so far we have started making some headway. Already today we had three people wave and one do the fingers, guess three out of four aint bad lol. This weekend we plan to do some day trips and visit old stuff, castles, museums and churches etc. and with a bit of luck we might fit in some shuttles of the local national track. It's a pretty cool wee track with a road gap, a rather large step down into trees and a hard right, and a 12-15ft stepdown gap into another sharp right, as well as lots of rocks and off camber hopefully get some more video footage up soon.

Till next time,
Bandit