Martin and Lucia always make a visit to Marlu Guest Farm worth your while. They really did their best to make life easy for me. Lucia gave a "divine" bowl of soup and sandwiches and also did my washing. They had some other family staying over and also had another couple from the district over. Martin was in his "element" and treated us with five different kinds of meat from the "braai". The only problem was that everything was only ready by 21:30! So as soon as I ate, I was off to bed.
Got up at 04:30 and left at 05:29. It is 11 km to the R329 and a further 11 km to the Verekraal turn-off. The next turn on a secondary road towards Baviaanskloof/Willowmore was also 11 km. So after 3 hours I covered 33 km. The next stretch was 42 km and also took 3 hours to complete. All the roads were, generally, in a very good condition. There were some ruff sections, but this never was longer than a couple of meters. At 50 km I hit a sandy patch, where I was forced to get off and push. Towards the end there was a rather steep little hill, but from the top it was all downhill up to the R332. This was the halfway point for the day.
Here I took a break and ate a sandwich. Up to this point I had only one catagorised climb, but the journey had 6, so 5 were on the last half of today's ride. It was 16 km to the next split where left take you to the Baviaans and right to the N9. I took the right, which had two options: option one is straight to N9 which was 32 km away with another 28 km on N9 to Uniondale or take the left at 15 km and continue on the Hartbeesrivier road, which joins the N9 10 km before Uniondale. I went for the second option.
After 157 km and 11:15, I arrived in Uniondale. After booking in, I had a shower and a pizza at the restarant next to the Uniondale Manor House. That was a hard day!
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