There’s a Tour of Rwanda?

I was riding around warming up for a race yesterday, when one of my team-mates comes along side me and tells about a few problems with regards to the Tour of Senegal. Although I am not part of the roster, the team is also doing Tour of Burkina Faso. Which is flat as a pan-cake and includes dirt roads. I was willing to do some dirt-roads at Tour of the Battenkill in the US in the spring, but that was one race and was in a country where you can get new inner-tubes easily. The problem with Tour of Senegal (at least one of the probs) is that there is only 1 day between Senegal and Burkina Faso… and seeing as Burkina Faso is organized by ASO (The Tour de France) it’s obviously more interesting to go to Burkina Faso. There are also a few other concerns about Senegal, such as organization, accommodation etc. Apparenlty NO French journalists will go to cover Senegal anymore… L

A few seconds after talking to my teammate, the team tells me they’ve entered me and are sending me to the Tour of Rwanda. I giggled for a bit, then finally realized they were serious. I didn’t know there was a Tour of Rwanda. Apparently it’s a good organization. Hard to believe. It’s a UCI 2.2 race, and they even plan a few stages that take you though areas where there are lots of monkeys and you race past elephants. They apparently do this on purpose to attract European riders and make the whole event that little bit more interesting. As scared shitless as I was of simply hearing “Tour of Rwanda” it was starting to sound interesting. Fine, whatever. When it comes to racing I’m pretty much up for anything (well, so long as it isn’t a boring crit of course) and this was starting to sound quite… dare I say it, exotic. Ahahh… problem however. The Tour of Rwanda is in November… 9 days of racing in mid November in fact. Problem there is that I am supposed to be in the US by then. So my doing this Tour isn’t looking likely. They’ve asked me to check into it and try and see if I could get a flight from the US directly to Rwanda… etc etc and do all I can to get my skinny white ass over there…

Oh and BTW: Rwanda is HILLLLLYYYYYY!!!!! (Yeah baby!)