Day 6

today was a beautiful day, fresh snow and blue sky. Started out with the regular drive, ski, drive home, on the way back however the ski hill here was so busy that the roads were absolutely horrendous and after a 10-15m of waiting not going anywhere and the roads just completely locked up we all jumped out of the bus and hopped on the gondola that was right beside us and thanks to a very nice lifty we bypassed all the line ups and with our accreditation we rode the gondola up to the top of the mountain and downloaded a small chairlift right to our hotel.

Day 4

Well not a whole lot of interest happened today, woke up to a nice sunny day skiing but turned out to be quite a snowy morning at the race site. The team's decided to take up loon calls. Pretty sure the bus driver wanted to shot everyone by the time we got home from the trails. Chill afternoon, hit up the sauna. Here's a few photo from the last few days
Or at least I would if the internet here wasn't quite so bad! Photo's to come soon.

Day 3 - Blizzard

Pretty un-eventful day today, really windy at the race site so the ski was really slow. The body is getting better now, did 10x10sec sprints this morning and felt pretty solid. Definitely still feeling the altitude but not as much as I was expecting before I got here.
The drive back nearly turned into a walk up the road to our hotel when the bus lost traction. after a while they got the chains on and with still quite a lot of wheel spin, partly due to porely attached chains, we made it up. While eating lunch the coaches arrived, all of them pretty wet, except for Graham who was looking very smug. Turns out they had to push their car some of the way up. Quite the blizzard blowing outside since lunch. We can barely make out the road outside.
This afternoon we came up with a good pass time, make kites out of random things we found and fly them out the hotel room window in the gusting wind. Well its now time for bed, going for an earlier bed tonight, hopefully I'll still sleep through the night.

Day 2 - First ski

The Hotel we're staying in is very European, you have to walk miles to the elevator, the place smells like smoke, you get complimentary matches and an ash tray in your room. But the food is excellent and so much choice.
Awoke this morning to a couple inches of fresh snow which apparently means that they close the road up to the ski hill where we're staying. waited till 10 for them to finally plow it. they had two guys standing in the back of a truck shoveling gravel onto the road!
Eventually got to the ski trails after dropping some random guy off on the side of the road and stopped at the weigh scale, oh and lots of horn honking.
The ski trails are pretty decent, deceptively steep as there are about a half dozen trees on the whole course. Skated today and just kinda plodded around checking things out.
shared the bus with the finish team and had to wait for them to all go shopping for water on the way back. Had a quick lunch because of everything we were put back a few hours.
At 4:45 we all bussed it down to town for a "mystery event" turned out to be Go Carting 5$ per turn and you got 8 minutes. It was in some underground parking under a mall. We all got to go once and some stayed on to go a second time, loads of fun.
Now just trying to stay awake till its late enough that my body will register it's in a new time zone

Day 1 of Worlds- Travel

Day one ended up being a few days later then planned but... I'm here now and time to get psyched
First day started out with a taxi from my brothers apartment to Van airport, first flight to Toronto went smoothly, unfortunately had to change to British Airways for the next two flight so collected my bags and dragged them over to international. Crazy busy there with one group of 150 high school kids flying to Spain. Slept the whole flight to London as it was essentially night time on Turkish time. Watched the sun rise in the airport and wandered up and down, it was like a shopping mall there. Flight to Istanbul was a little ghetto, only tv's hanging from the ceiling and they would glitch out with any rattle of the plane. Now, the Istanbul airport i had been dreading most of all on this trip, long line up for the visa and mayhem to get through customs, grabbed bags and ran to domestic, checked in with Turkish Airlines with a lady who couldn't speak one word of english. security was really quick, went to the wrong gate, realised but made it with 10 mins to spare. apparently "Snack" to them means full on lunch but only had about 5 minutes to eat it before we were descending again. Ankara was a full on run through the airport to the next gate which had changed from what was on my ticket so messed that one up again. Pretty sure I was the only non-turkish on the flight. Got to Erzurum at 8pm and was amazed all my bags made it even with the 20min connection in Ankara.
Turns out a couple of out team were supposed to be on my last flight but didn't make their connection so Eric De-Nys didn't think I had so waited in outside the airport for an hour.
Already discovered that the driving here is pretty hairy, not really any rules, people just drift from lane to lane and horns come in quite useful.

First week at WOP

Top of the stein