Cozza’s diary: A cheetah drive-by, rain and sandstorms in Qatar

After settling in to our desert oasis, we went for a ride. Many extremely strange things happened today. That’s why I like traveling so much! It’s just been one great adventure already. Just five minutes after leaving the hotel parking lot, I sensed something was looking at me. I turned to my left and there, sticking its head out of an SUV like a dog, was a full-grown cheetah! I was so excited because a cheetah is my favorite animal and here it was, just inches from my face. I was so bummed I didn’t have my camera.

We rode on and into the desert. Everything looked exactly the same and we couldn’t see more than 2 kilometers down the road because of the sand and dust in the air. I just read in the newspaper this morning that yesterday there were over 120 car accidents because of the dust storm. Can you imagine being on your bike in a dust storm? That would be nuts…

We rolled on and on down the pancake flat terrain and in the middle of the desert, it started to rain. In minutes we were caked in sand. It was as if we had all jumped into the ocean and then decided to roll around on the dry sand afterwards. At first, I was a bit angry to come to such a warm place and then have to ride in the rain, but then I became happy for the people that live here, because water shortage is a huge problem in the Middle East.

We kept riding and then came across a guy riding a road bike too. As it turned out, this guy is a P.E. teacher from California. He’s here teaching in the Doha middle school. What a small world this is. All in all, we did two hard efforts during the ride and did a total of three hours. After riding the TTT circuit that we would be racing 8 kilometers on the next day, we headed back to the hotel for a shower and some lunch.

The food here is good. It’s lots of fluffy jasmine rice, hummus, chicken and lamb.

Unfortunately the cross winds Monday were so harsh that it caused wheels to cross and Steven went down pretty hard with a broken collarbone. But he is in good spirits and ready to start the healing process.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Home Page, Rider Diaries, Slipstream and tagged with Rider Diary, Steven Cozza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.