Today’s ride was for Namatovu Patience. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads!!

It was a pretty chill day today – 32 miles on part dirt and part pavement into the town of Soroti. It is Sunday so the singing from the church buildings was loud and beautiful and people were more dressed up than usual. I love the bright colours of Uganda – ladies of all ages rock the gomesi dress. I somehow don’t think I could pull it off. I’ll try to get a picture of one for you.

We had pizza for lunch and spent the afternoon going through all of gear and dividing it into two piles – take it with us or leave it behind with our friend Vincent. He drove 6 hours to meet us and exchange gear, bringing us some food stuffs we left behind and see if there was anything else we needed.

I know you’re surprised to hear that the weight on my bike is too much. I have been hitting the miles but it’s hard. I feel pretty weak in comparison to what the women do here on a daily basis, but I’m feeling 50 and want to enjoy myself more and not always be struggling. So we have decided to take the rack off my front and move weight off my bike to John’s bike (again). Anyone else see a pattern here? We are also dropping some things that we haven’t used yet…sleeping bags (it’s too hot and we have light sheets to use instead), privacy tent, water filtration system (again, we have another system in place and bottled water is cheap and plentiful) and some odds and ends that now seem really stupid to have brought.

Starting tomorrow, we are going to go off our original route a bit in order to add some potential gems in the western part of the country. Murchison Falls National Park is just too close to ignore and we hope to spend more rest time along the way and then have a couple days to spend with the Get Schooled kids. That is still five and a half weeks away. Gulp.