Day 9: Battle Mountain, NV

Lazy day.  Slept until 11 am, thereby carefully avoiding having to do any work setting up the course.  Fortunately HP Team Delft are once again well provided with a horde of Penniless Student Oaves (hereinafter abbreviated to PSO) and all was done on time and in budget.  The local tourism people, in the form of the splendid Laura, raised the cash to replace the remaining steel marker posts on the course with plastic ones, and NDOT installed them, so there was no need to mess around with old tyres like last year.

Then over to the Owl Club for lunch / very late breakfast with Al 'n' Alice Krause and Mike Sova (hereinafter referred to as Mikey), followed by a trip over to the America's Best Value motel to meet up with the Hairy McScots, aka Team Beastie (rider Mr G Obree).  They are a jolly bunch and were greatly amused by Al's description of most of those present: "a beer-drinking club with a bicycle problem".  Back to the Super 8 for more loafing, talking rubbish, etc. etc. before, on pain of being killed utterly to DETH by reader Miss von Brandenburg, I went off around the town, taking pictures.  These may be viewed at here.  But they're mostly a Rubbish, so I wouldn't bother.  Use Google StreetView instead.

The initial meeting for all involved took place at 7 pm, fortunately in the Civic Center rather than the Black Hole of Calcutta which is the Super 8 conference room with about a hundred people in it.  This tends to go on a bit, and we really ought to try to get the PA working.  Finally back to base for faffing with that The Internet - uploading photos, reading and/or posting to a couple of fora, e-mail and writing the next instalment of the Automatic Diary.  All of which takes ages, as the Babbage-Engine seems to be thrashing away like Metallica in a pit of Bitey Ants.  Not much happened today hence the brevity of today's post.  Also it's late.  Tomorrow there will, I'm certain, be more to report.  Provided I remember to set the alarm...