After Nationals, I quickly packed up my little nursery at Elinor’s, totally filling my car, and drove to Dartmouth. I had already missed a week of classes but it was too late to dwell on that. I had a busy part of a week back at school that was filled with finding professors okay with me missing about half their classes, unpacking into my apartment at “14″, and skiing at Oak Hill which was not quite as snowy as Craftsbury but luckily still skiable. Then after 4 days of classes we packed up the Dartmouth vans and headed to Lake Placid for the first carnival of the season. On Friday the Dartmouth women’s team had an awesome first race of the season and we swept the top 5 in the 5km classic. We were even missing one of our top skiers too. We had a 15km skate mass start on Saturday which also went well for our team and we won our first carnival of the season! Then I had a few more days back on campus to tie up loose ends and just as I was starting to feel organized it was time to pack my bags and head off again, this time for Germany!
I flew with four other Dartmouth skiers also going to World Juniors and U23 Worlds. Compared to flying to Anchorage, this trip was very easy. We had one empty non-stop flight from Boston to Zurich that was only 6.5 hours long. I had 3 seats in a row to myself which is more than enough for me to stretch fully out on and my biggest complaint (have to have one) was that there wasn’t enough sleeping time. The Tylenol PM was just getting going when the flight attendants turned on the lights and slammed the breakfast cart into my feet.
The US team is staying at a Best Western near Hinterzarten Germany. The rooms are actually quite spacious especially for European standards though the beds are still pretty tiny. The best part of getting to our rooms was finding chocolates on our pillows though unfortunately this service hasn’t continued. We eat our meals at the hotel and for the most part they are really good. The bread is excellent and the breakfast buffet is always amazing. I’ve found a few new things that I like including Fla (I’m not sure spelling but its a liquidy pudding desert) and pork sausage wrapped in cabbage. At lunch today, though, we had some sort of SPAM/hot dog meat that also looked a bit like french toast and that one was not quite as tasty.
I’ve skied a couple times now at the race site and the trails are very hilly. They are also very wide. In some places it is 4 classic lanes AND 3 skate lanes wide. The sprint course has a big wide hill in the beginning and then it gets very twisty and narrow which should make the heats interesting. The first race of the Championships is on Monday with the Junior sprint and my first race is a skate sprint on Tuesday.
I’ll try to add pictures and post more updates but I’m having some computer problems. My computer charger died so I’m borrowing from the few people on the trip who have Dells instead of Macs so I have to limit my computer usage.
