Last training ride today. I went out for a 120km loop through some routes that looked interesting. The weather forecast said that Saturday was dry and Sunday was not, so it was another early Saturday start.

Realized I hadn't tweaked the handlebar camera to point the other way, and I hadn't replaced the broken safety loop, and I hadn't charged it, so no handlebar video today. Unfortunately I haven't done that gear check yet either, and I'm feeling increasingly guilty about that, so I don't have much leftover shame for the camera.

The weather forecast was 4 degrees all day. My usual strategy for dealing with the cold is "ride faster" but I'm starting to understand that this doesn't always work. So I put on a sweater and fingerless gloves before heading out. Figured that if I got too hot I could take them off.

That was a wildly bad misjudgement…

Two weeks to go!  Time is getting so short that the milk’s expiry date is after I leave. The bike has been into the shop for a service; it got cleaned.  The gears were re-lubed and it was noticeably easier to pedal, which probably means I should have spent more effort looking after the drivetrain.   I also wish I'd done that gear check I talked about last week.  I’m sure something is missing or needing to be replaced and it’s going to get complicated or expensive.

3 weeks to go. That means just two more training rides! I'm not really feeling the benefits from them, maybe I should have done more? Too late to change now, time is running out. Specifically, time to order and receive replacements from the nice budget places I shop online. Do I need more tyre milk? Do I have those spare valves and the removal tool? Is there anything missing from the toolbag? It's a good moment to do a full gear check, just to be sure.

Wish I'd thought of that earlier in the weekend, but I didn't until it was so late into Sunday evening that the hour had crossed from "weekend chore o'clock" into "nope".

Change of plans because of injury. On Friday I went down some stairs and when I got to the bottom, my left ankle wasn't right. In fact it was so painful I needed to have a bit of a sit down. It did improve quickly though: walking on it is fine now. Going up stairs is fine too. But downstairs is definitely not fine: there's some warning pain when it's bent too far forwards, like when coming down off a step.

But that's why I'm not going for a long ride to Germany this weekend.

I've been looking around for new destinations for the weekend ride, and found a good one: Germany!  I can get over the border and back to Nijmegen in about 7 hours, then it's a two hour trainride back home.

Took a long ride this weekend. This isn't the disciplined execution of a professionally prepared training plan, for this trip the philosophy is to just ride the distances I'm planning to do. Well, once a week anyway.

So this weekend I rode to Arnhem. That was about 120km, with 540m of climbing - rookie numbers by NZ standards, but excitingly high for the Netherlands. It's a repeat of a route I took last year while training for South America, because it had a surprising amount of climbing. And while I have the energy to ride for seven hours, I don't have enough to plan a new route.

I've got seven weeks before I get on a plane to NZ. I'm only planning two weeks on the bike, and some unhelpful thought keeps trying to tell me it's too short to be a challenge. But motivation is a problem.

Another ride is on the horizon. I'll be in NZ for a family Christmas, and few other weeks too. Which is enough time to go for a ride around one of the islands. I'm still figuring out the dates and all the other details. So it's not clear how much time is available, where we'll be, and what is possible. Ideally I'll ride the whole length of NZ because anything less is unfinished business. But depending on time maybe it'll only be the length of one island. Maybe the smaller one. Or maybe even less.

I was sure my bike got stolen at Santiago airport. An unreasonably helpful person gave me some assistance with the bike, but there were some weird things going on, and after getting to security I had an unpleasant realization that he was sus.

He appeared when I was checking in, acted like he worked there - in hindsight, he almost certainly didn't have the official lanyard on. He helped put the bike on the scales to be weighed when I checked in, stayed with me while I retaped some parts of the bikebox, walked me over to the outsize baggage dropoff, asked me for a luggage barcode, helped get it onto the conveyor. I took a photo of the box, got a thumbs-up from the people behind the desk, and headed off. I didn't see the bike go along the conveyor, into the handling area and out of reach, like I normally do.

Luggage barcode? I've been unhealthily paranoid about the bike all trip and this should have set me off, but it didn't until too late. Normal people don't ask for luggage barcodes. Airport staff might. People pretending to be airport staff shouldn't.

So I spent the flight to Madrid fairly sure that the bike was gone.

Last ride today. Time for last things: last time to wind up the charge cords, bag up the electronics, squeeze it all into the pannier. Refill the water bottles, clean out the empties from the rack backpack and pack it. Check the broken pannier is still OK and clipped up. Hook on the good one, slide it as far back as it can go for foot clearance, connect up the strap. The backpack loops over the seat, the arm straps go through clips on the panniers. Thread the handlebar camera over the handlebar, check it's properly seated in the mount. Water bottle in the holder bag.

Get the bike outside, last checks that the tyres are the right pressure, the drivetrain is good, brakes working, nothing looks out of place. Turn on Garmin and activate the GPS tracking. Turn on the handlebar camera, connect to its Wifi network and start recording. Switch to Komoot and start navigation. Phone into the handlebar mount. Time to ride.

It's been five solid cycling days and I wasn't feeling excited about doing stuff today, so it was an actual rest day. So there's not much to report. The hotel had a breakfast buffet, but since there's only one more day I didn't overdo it. I went out for a walk around at lunchtime, got some empanadas from a bakery. For dinner I went out to a Japanese restaurant - and that got interesting.

I didn't want to repeat yesterday's lunch problems so I headed to a pasteleria straight away. It wasn't actually a pasteleria, and didn't have anything I could take for lunch so I went to another. Closed. And the next just had sweets. Another didn't seem to exist any more. Yet another just had plain breadrolls. I think I visited about five places, all were a miss for one reason or another. So I made the effort, but I have to get on the road, so we're back to yesterday's plan: "I'm sure I'll pass a nice pasteleria".

But all this excitement did mean I didn't retrace my path through Curicó.

Third to last cycling day today. Once again the start and finish are on the Ruta 5 so to mix things up I took a route out west, along the river. This adds a bit of time but it means I'll follow a river which should be worthwhile, right?

Today's lunch plan is "I'm sure I'll pass a nice pasteleria". I also need another isotonic drink. The route out of Talca was a bike lane on the main road; I passed three schools or Universities and zero pastelerias. No problem, I pass San Rafael soon, I'll pick something up there.

Over the bridge, turn right, up a hill and it's only five minutes but I'm in the wilderness, no sign of the city I just left. The hill felt like a serious climb but checking the elevation profile shows nothing to get excited about. So I guess I’m still warming up.

The hills are brown with small scattered trees, and no shade - it reminds me of cycling in Spain.

Today the start and finish are on the Ruta 5, and Komoot avoids that highway so hard it's taken me east into the mountains. Which I don't have any objections to.

Like yesterday, the route was built on two things: crossing the river without swimming, and not being on the Ruta 5.

One of the Chilean engineers had specifically warned me about false river crossings in the OpenStreetMap data. He'd been riding out here and had been routed into a river. So a few weeks back we'd scrawled on a map screenshot so I'd remember the problem. Last week when setting up the route I'd checked it, found the problem, and fixed it like he suggested.

And today, I had no memory of this and charged right down the line without a care in the world. It avoided one problem, but there was a second one that I nearly ran into.

Two problems this morning. The first was the accommodation in Parral. I'd originally planned to ride to Parral today, and last night I'd WhatsApp'd the one OK place in Parral to ask about a room. This morning they texted back to say they had no availability.

So that's a problem. Stay somewhere else in Parral? Or ride somewhere else? The only other Parral option is a homestay on booking.com that's 37,000 CLP per night which probably means it was 25,000 originally. I don't want to be a part of that shakedown, and can't find another way to contact the homestay, so that's out.

Cauquenes is north, it makes the route slightly longer, but it doesn't look like a nice place to go. Linares is another few hours up the road, has lots of options, let's go there! Komoot happily sets up a route for the extra distance. I idly check the second river crossing and find there's no bridge, and no ferry: it's trying to take me through a river.

Potentially trip-ending drama today. I was leaving the tollbooths at Penablanca, rolled off the pavement onto the road, and the crank arm broke off. The crank arm is that very solid piece of metal connecting the pedal to the bottom bracket. It routinely takes my full weight when I'm standing on the pedals, so I'd expect it to be generously overengineered. So I was quite shocked when it cracked off.

I did have the presence of mind to get a photo. (But if I start taking reaction face selfies please strangle me.) I had a good look at the cracked edge, felt a bit let down by Bombtrack, and stuck it into the pannier for later.

There a few things I’m keen to see in Concepción, but the top one is Plaza Jurásica: it's life size dinosaur statues! It’s a long walk to get there but I don’t have much else to do today.

One nice thing about Chile is that there is a lot of street art. And it’s usually good. The pictures I'm posting are not a balanced sample because I don't stop to take photos of the bad ones. But I do for the good ones ... and today's trip was extra slow because there was a lot of good stuff on the route today.

Plaza Jurásica (Jurassic Plaza) has four full-size dinosaurs: a Diplodocus (22m long), a Tyrannosaurus rex, a hanging Pterosaur (with 7m wingspan) and some small hatching dinosaurs that were so badly graffitied I didn't take any pictures.

Which means laundry. And again, it's going to be tricky. Google Maps shows a bunch of laundromats around, most are closed in the weekend. There's a few that are open today, but they're closed on Sunday. They also tend to close at 1600, which means it not only needs to be done today, but quickly. Spending just the weekend in a city makes things complicated! Originally I was planning to arrive on Thursday night so I had Friday for these things. But the rest day after the crash in Temuco delayed things by a day.

Anyway, one of the very few laundromats that's open today is just around the corner. I take over my laundry bag and ask if they can get it done today? Sadly no. (The answer was a lot longer but my Spanish isn't good enough.) I'm so desperate I go back and check if skipping ironing and folding will help: still no.

My experience with hotel laundry is that it's wildly expensive but I'm now desperate enough to ask. The guy at front desk says they'll do it and have it back tomorrow! How much? He needs to find out... and then he comes back with the news that they don't actually do laundry on the weekend.

I'm out of options.

I’m taking a fairly direct path from Los Angeles to Concepción, and the main roads don’t go that way. So today’s route goes through some deeply rural back roads.

One thing I didn’t grasp before starting is that while there’s 1000m of climbs, which is average, it’s almost all in the second half. So the first few hours were a straightforward run on asphalt. And then the backroads are only climbs, all gravel, low gear the whole time. The elevation profile shows four big climbs: they’re 100-150m each, which won’t be too bad if the gravel isn’t too deep.

Today had more roadworks than road. I think there was about 40km of road construction going on, including grading earth, wetting gravel, laying asphalt, rolling it, forming concrete barriers, building pedestrian overbridges. I can't be sure but it looks like a two-lane road is getting upgraded to a 4-lane highway, two lanes each way.

The roadworks had some advantages and disadvantages. One big advantage is that there were quite a few sections of good, flat road which was blocked off to prevent regular traffic using it - but there were no workmen or equipment on it so I discreetly squeezed between the barriers and cruised along for a kilometer or two. Sticking to the side in case of construction traffic, because it's still a work site.

Bikes are also fairly inoffensive, and these construction sites aren't exactly high-security. So even when there were people working, if it looked low-key I'd sail on through. A crane was lifting railings up onto a pedestrian overbridge, it had cones around it but there was plenty of space to get by ... so I did. Even got a wave from the crane driver.

Some sections aren't such a clear benefit. I rode through unattended construction roads which were gravel, rough earth - and one that was just sand. I had to get off and push for most of that one.