Germany: Day 2
 
Well, I got to ski twice today, so that was good.  And I am still awake at 8:00pm here (10:11am in AK), so that’s another good thing.  I just have one hour to go until I am allowed to go to sleep, so I hope that I will make it and get a blog written in the process.
 
The first ski was at the venue, and it was really productive to get to know the courses.  They have some intense hills here!  It is pretty sweet.  They go up up up up, then down.  There really isn’t any flat.  The uphills are sustained and fairly skiable, and the downhills are extremely fun and fast.  There was quite a bit of new snow so the uphills were pretty soft.  That will be different when they till the hard-packed man-made snow in with the new.
 
In the afternoon I skied with junior teammate Joanne Reid at a different venue, and we got a bit turned around.  We were a bit cocky after ending back up in the stadium after our first foray, and I didn’t really pay attention to where we were going.  Luckily, after realizing that we were not going to be able to make a loop, I was able to remember and retrace the way we came.  It did cost us about 30 min of extra skiing, but we didn’t end up back in Hinterzarten (we drove 15 minutes from there to get to the ski area, and were apparently headed that way before we decided to turn around).  On the bright side, I felt better going a bit harder at the end and it didn’t get totally dark.  Here are a couple of photos from early in that ski...
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
If you will notice in the photo of the buildings, all of these farm houses have massive solar panels on their roofs. This is extremely common here, and I bet that throwing a rock onto someone’s roof in these parts is a more serious offense than carrying an unregistered firearm is in Alaska.  Not that is probably saying very much, though I haven’t tried either so I can’t tell you definitively.
 
And now it’s 9:15pm.  I made it! I got distracted by handball on TV and talking to teammates, but now I get to go to bed and the blog is done.  Mission accomplished.
 
 
Thursday, January 21, 2010