Something went wrong today.
I was late on the bike, and so the ride had already started – but only by 10 seconds or so. I expected to be dumped into the starting pens, but was instead dropped into the already-in-progress ride with pedal assist.
The route today should have been the Big Loop, taking in the Epic KOM, and then the Jungle Circuit, for a total of ~40km. I was anticipating a ride time of 1h 15m approx. Of the two big parts of the ride, the Epic KOM was what I was looking forwards too, with a lot less enthusiasm for the Jungle Circuit.
However, very quickly into the ride I got turned off the route and sent on my own way. For a short period of time I expected the game to “catch up” somehow and move my rider back to the route with everyone else… but that wasn’t to be.
As a result I was sent on my own personal Tour of Watopia Stage 5 Longer Ride.
A magical mystery tour.
A bug.
Or, 
an Easter Egg … ?
It was, initially, pretty annoying. I’d got my bike back on the turbo, was wearing my tatty indoor kit, and was in the mindset of doing a Zwift session, even though outside it’s lovely weather and I could have happily taken an hour’s outdoor ride instead. Stopping and swapping would be so disruptive as to not be worthwhile.
So I plodded on.
After a bit of a detour around the map, I seemed to find myself on the Hilly Loop.
This isn’t a route I do out of choice.
But today I got to do four repeats.
I was somewhat expecting it to send me on the route that the B / Standard ride would be taking. Not sure why. But no, after I’d done one Hilly Loop, and it started me around on the same route again, I knew I was in for repeats.
In my head, I figured I’d see it out for the distance. On the clock today we had the 40km or so, with, I think, 600m of climbing. I figured I would do my ride to hit the same distance, and see where I came out in terms of distance climbed.
And so that was it really, repeats of the Hilly Loop.
Not the most enjoyable as an entirely solo ride, but I tried to get the most out of it all the same.
My method was to treat each climb of the Zwift KOM as a 5 minute threshold effort, and then aim to do as much of the rest of the lap as possible at tempo.
That definitely got progressively harder, and I certainly found myself thinking that the lap felt mostly up hill. I reckon in some ways I’d rather do that lap in reverse. Get the climb out of the way, and coast for the rest of the lap 
Anyway, that’s me done with the Tour of Watopia. Yes, it wasn’t the ride I was meant to do, but it’s the one I did and I’m not going to spend another 1h 15m+ on the turbo tomorrow when the weather’s looking good outdoors. Pretty tired actually, may just skip it altogether.
