since the tour de france starts today and i'd like to take the colnago out for a brief spin to work myself into a fenzy for the rpologue, i'll keep this issue of the washing machine post as brief as humanely possible. after all, the tour is on eurosport and itv2 this year (with liggett and sherwen) so there are all those highlights to watch long into the night. (apologies if you're not in the uk or can't get eurosport but i believe quite a number of channels throughout the world take a feed from le tour so i figure if you want to watch the tour, you probably can.
anyway, this post has nothing at all to do with the tour, but more to do with something that happens after it's finished. last year we had the first annual washing machine post, islay century ride, and after mentioning it in these very pixels, one or two of you out there with little better to do, e-mailed to say that you were on islay at the time and would join me on this undertaking.
so i'm issuing the invitation again. if you're on islay, with bike on sunday, august 4, 2002 and fancy cycling one hundred miles round islay in a day (took about six and a half hours last year), drop me an e-mail. it's nice to have company. if you wish, you can allow yourself to be sponsored to raise money for a favoured charity (i'm raising money for islay pipe band) but there's no necessity to do so if you don't want to. there's also no compulsion to cycle the whole one hundred miles. if you'd like to join me for a bit of that distance, feel free to do so.
if you've a map of islay in front of you, here's where we go: from bowmore (mactaggart leisure centre, next to the distillery) at 10:00am on sunday morn, cycle along the low road to port ellen maltings, then along the high road to the glen road. all the way up the glen road to ballygrant before turning back down to bridgend. from there, we follow the port charlotte road to uiskentuie and over the loch gruinart, up past the rspb centre and over to loch gorm which is encircled anti-clockwise and back down to the port charlotte road. a munch break at bruichladdich before cycling on to port charlotte and across to kilchiaran on the west side following the road down to portnahaven. now it's north again and back up through port charlotte and bruichladdich before turning left and back round loch gorm clockwise and back out at uislentuie. from there back to bridgend, off to the left to mulindry, down to the high road, over the cruach road and into bowmore.
that's a hundred miles. so if you fancy it, get in touch.
Remember, you can still read the review of 'the dancing chain' the utterly excellent book on the history of the derailleur bicycle by clicking here
any of the books reviewed on the washing machine post can probably be purchased from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com
as always, if you have any comments on this nonsense, please feel free to e-mail and thanks for reading.
this column almost never appears in the dead tree version of the ileach but appears, regular as clockwork, on this website every two weeks. (ok so i lied) sometimes there are bits added in between times, but it all adds to the excitement.
on a completely unrelated topic, ie nothing to do with bicycles, every aspect of the washing machine post was created on apple macintosh powerbook g4, ibook and imac computers, using adobe golive 5 and adobe photoshop 7. needless to say it is also best viewed on an apple macintosh computer.