Big day with Fabio and Sophia D. Started at what Sophia calls morning and varrying levels of preparedness. Sophia was prepared for almost anything, but not for the amount of weight that the almost anything would be. Fabio had lots of things in his pockets. To be fair, he asked me and my advice was to not bring much so his back wouldn’t hurt. I was the usual unprepared.

We quickly realized that I was solidly slower than the two of them on my rollerblades. I soon became like a package being delivered, with them breaking wind and marshaling me through steep turns. I felt very special.

My OSM+vibes based routing worked fine until we ended up on some gravel paths. The peak failure was when we took a wrong turn and had to hike back to the real path on some gnarly gravel that simply couldn’t be rolled.

Even without GPS, we were able to localize with the help of Fabio’s geoguessr expertise. By the end, we were all experts in identifying the country by the bollard. If we saw the red stripe on the pointy bollard, we knew we were either in France… or some French colony.

At the beginning there was about a millimeter left on my brakes. Very quickly I was burning through the brake casing. I switched to the T stop and on the steep bits either carefully weaving through intersections or piggybacking on Fabio’s brakes.

We had an unfortunately long stop at Intersport (apparently pronounced anterspoort (FR)) where I was confidently told a brake would fit my skates which ChatGPT had told me wouldn’t fit. AI 1, Frenchman 0. The chatty cashier quickly caught my bad French but first guessed I was Irish because of my shirt. Correcting him didn’t do me any good, because I was then at fault for trying to take Canada which he was not pleased with.

“Which state are you from?” “Massachusetts” “That’s a Trump state!”

Do I explain to this man that Massachusetts is actually a purple state because we had Baker, a Republican governer, but it’s still mostly liberal? Or do I accept defeat and move on.

On the way back from France, I was extremely pleased to stumble across some Tomatensaft. Paired with pickles, one is simply invincible.

Ended off everyone’s first 100 miler on their respective vehicles with my first sit in the little Freiburg stream thingies and some solid TGTG pastries.

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