Day 23- The Storm

   Waking up this morning was hard! After yesterdays Pistol Flip session, I was really feeling the pain and some hard hits. I walked around the island at about 630 am and then climbed back into my tent for some more sleep. Around 8, I finally got up and braved the day. 

    It was another sunny, blue sky day. Breakfast was amazing, with sausages in the eggs, that was an pretty great surprise. The fresh bread on the island is mind blowing and it tastes so natural, it is impossible to find bread like that in the states. 

    Because the water levels were so odd, we ended up “Catanning” on the top of the hill. The board game, “Settlers of Catan", is pretty popular on the island and we play two or three times a day. It’s pretty brilliant. So we set up the board, put the SPF’s on, and went to it. Most of us stayed up there until lunch, four hours later, some of us were more tan than before, some were much more red than before. I am into another book called “One Day” that I found on the island, it is a good read. I am not going to lie, I don’t read when I am not in tropical places, reading here still feels like a novelty. 

    After lunch, it was off to Nile Special again. Today I wanted to work more on Pistol Flips, going the other way. It seemed to work pretty well, another very fun session. Midway through the session, I looked up and saw a massive black cloud looming and heading straight towards us. A gust of wind hit and the cameras on tripods went flying, one almost landed straight in the river! The rain came shortly after, not a nice, refreshing rain, it was a pounding rain that stung when it hit your skin. It rained so hard, you couldn’t see upstream or downstream more than 30 yards. Of course, because its tropical, after about eight minutes, everything stopped and within another minute the sun was shining and it was suddenly hot again. So odd. 

    At the end of the session I did a competition ride, it wasn't super good but Nile Special was flushy today so I was still pretty happy with it. The course only has three more days, I am trying to sponge everything that I am learning right now, so I can utilize it at a later date.