Austria! Part 2

During our three “off” days we had to find other things to do to keep ourselves entertained. We ran about an hour every day, and besides this, we were free to do what we will. My first step to freedom was bringing my naps from under an hour to an average of 2+hrs every day. I would also spend more time eating, although I would eat the same amount, I would do it slower. Also, me, Colin and Steffan found a cool pedal bike that probably weighs about a hundred pounds, that you can pedal both backwards and forwards and still coasts!


Looking down at Ramsau from the top of a chairlift tower

On our first off day, we went to Salzburg, which is about a one hour drive from Ramsau. We stayed there for a couple hours, which was enough time for me to find some cool beer mugs to take home to the family. We also saw a majestic-lookin castle, and found some garbage cans hidden in the walls, awesome!


Super garbage can




Castle

By the time we got back to the skiing, I was feeling refreshed and ready for another five hard training days. The first day of training I started off with an easy two hour ski and went up from there. The most I skied was about 2:45min on the second last day. For this day, the weather was absolutely perfect and nothing beats being one of the last athletes to leave the glacier. It felt great to ski through the slushy snow, sun beating down, and hardly another athlete in sight!


The crew, getting ready for another day of skiing


Drying clothes on the deck

One of the afternoons we skied down the roller ski track in Ramsau. This was my second time skiing the track, and I can tell you that it is really fun. The track is, in my opinion, the perfect width and the pavement is perfect. The downhill’s are intimidating at first, by you quickly realise that you can keep a lot of speed around the corners because of how banked the corners are (yeah, banked corners, you better believe it!). There's a good video of us on youtube going down the track. Eventually I'll learn how to post videos, but for now you'll hyave to find it yourself...

Another afternoon during a run, we climbed a steep ridge and got a great view of the landscape. Here are a couple of photos.


Me climbing a sketchy cliff


Colin climbed to the top of this lttle peak and got a pretty nice view


The last day of skiing I put in a solid two-hour effort, knowing fully that it would probably be at least a month before I would be skiing on snow again. That same day we packed up all our stuff by 2pm, loaded our bags into the vans and headed off to Munich, where we would be spending our last night. Munich was nice, but I’m not much of a city person. We had a good time trying to figure our way around the Subway system and caught up with the Thunder Bay athletes for some time, which was fun. The next day we took our 8hr, direct flight at noon. Check out the photos of our meal!



Lastly, I would like to make a couple shout-outs. Firstly, a shout out to Colin Abbott who is really awesome to hang out with and had a bunch of really great movies and, more importantly, some sick tunes to share with us the whole time. I would also like to make a shout-out to Steffan for putting up with my snoring and a shout-out to Alex for all the free Red Bull. Finally, I would like to thank all the other athletes for making this trip so much fun as well as all of the coaches and waxing staff.

I’m out,

Andrew Stewart-Jones

Parting Shot

Cool offroad scooter, tires are 7 inches wide!