The campground in Rotterdam was right on the racecourse, which is always a nice way to do things if you can manage it. The race course itself was fairly sparse and desolate, being as it was in the docks, but it offered a wide variety of terrain, from smooth pavement, tracks, heavy cobble, gravel, sand, and everything inbetween. Right away it showed the potential for a hugely complex course, and it was definitely able to deliver on that potential.
What we may not have been expecting was the amount of rain that was to fall over the first 2 days of qualifying... It wasn't the quantity, but that it just never really seemed to stop, creating a muddy wasteland out of the camping area, and leaving everything that much dirtier. Made for a realistic race, though, i suppose. Things ran late, as is inevitable with these events, but due to planning for 6-700 competitors (and there only being about 400 or so), things worked out regardless, because the delayed events took less tiemto complete than was planned for. The semi-finals even got discarded, as the number of people who made it to the semis was roughly equal to the number they had planned for in the final - so everyone who made it to the semi was automatically put into the finals.
The finals were perhaps the finest course and race format I'd yet seen in a messenger championships. 18 checkpoints, and somewhere around 15 points on the course where routing decisions are available, creating what seems like a near-infinite variety of possible routings for a single lap of the course - and every pickup meant a choice between 2 packages, so you had to constantly be thinking about how you were building your run. To top it all off, you had to do this for 4 manifests, which meant about 2 hours of racing. Fortunately, the rain let up for Sunday and the finals, so while there was still plenty of damp ground, the racing was generally dry. The real treat, though, was that none of the finalists got to see the actual map and checkpoint list until they started the race - your manifest and course map were in your bag, which was on your bike in the le mans lineup... everyone started on equal footing, and how they dealt with that first look at their plan for the next 2 hours sometimes settled the whole race for people within minutes.
The secret, it seemed, was to just race clean. Smart is always good, and fast is always good, but neither is of much use if it stands alone - esepcially on a course like this. The format placed a huge emphasis on map-reading skills and quick decision-making, which favored the level-headed over the straight-out speed demons. That meant me, apparently, cause I crossed the finish line quite well, with the volunteers at the line telling me they thought i was somewhere around 35th or so... Come awards ceremony time, that got bumped up to 21st, which had me very pleased... It was one month later in Freiburg that I finally got to look at the official results, to find myself 18th, firmly in the top 20, and to my knowledge, the highest ranking ever acheived at the ECMC by a non-European! At the time, this gave me a fair bit of hope for a good performance at CMWC, but that was to be a different story...
The night of the 4th found the camp site coming down as racers left for home, and I transferred myself to a nearby hotel with Hiske, Mo, Maria and Laus for my last night in Rotterdam. I packed some stuff up as people were leaving, and put things in cars heading to Zurich, Budapest, and back to Amsterdam - my beloved MSR stove went back, as the plastic bit on the pump had broken off somewhere between SF and here, and a replacement part would cost almost as much as a new stove, so i decided to "rough" it, and get any hot food i desired from restaurants from this point on. After the downing of more than a few Heinekens that evening, it was off to bed - tommorrow the tour really began!
On to the next stage, Rotterdam > Paris