rain and cobbles

So, pissing rain here in Belgium right now. Went from a cool and overcast morning with quick little showers to this. Dark, thunder and absolutely pissing rain. To make matters more fun, about 8 of the boys are out reconing the UCI course for tomorrow. They would be at about 2 hours of a 5 hour ride right now. Shitty. Oh well, personally, I got back from 2.5 hours about a hour ago and am currently sitting on the couch after a nice hot shower drinking tea and waiting for today's stage of the Dauphine to come on at 3:30. Good ride today, slowly getting into the grove of things. Up at 7:30 today, breakfast, followed by a team meeting at 9. Basically to get us new guys up to date on basic rules and to help meet everyone because everyone runs kinda different schedules. After that, I headed out for my ride and decided to follow the green H's today. Sweet ride, little rain for about 5 minutes but for the most part spent the ride home racing against the the clouds to beat it back. Job done. Did my first section of pave today, about 400-500m of bouncing along, awesome, and then visited my first Belgian bakery (Brakrij Chris). Had this smokin sweet little pastry which was like two layers of fine, sugary crust with this jam-eske stuff sandwiched in between (kinda like balaclava). Turned into the wind from there for the remainder of the loop home. I really want to learn some flemish, feels kinda weird right now being in a place where I don't understand much of what is happening or being said. English and french have generally gotten me by everywhere I've been before. All for now, apparently Bernard returns on Monday so I should get some kits and some more word on when I can start racing soon. Starting to get a little excited to get a Kermesse under my belt. I will try some tempo work during my ride tomorrow to get a better feel for how my legs are doing, felt decently strong today while letting loose with some high cadence work and form sprints. We'll see how it goes...