Travel to the World Cup

I woke up in Putney, Vermont this morning hoping to pack and get one more technique ski in with Zach Caldwell. (It may be a stretch to call it “this morning”. It’s currently 6:55 a.m. on Monday here in Frankfurt, Germany, 12:55 a.m. in Putney, but I haven’t slept a wink since “this morning”.) We ended up having too much packing to do, so we didn’t do the session. It’s not the end of the world, but I don’t feel that we got very much closure on the new technique cues we developed this week. But we had a lot of packing to do! Here’s Zach sorting out my skis:

We packed all of my racing skis for the winter. We also packed the entire fleets of my teammates Sylvan Ellefson and Tad Elliott. Then we packed all of Kris Freeman’s skis that came back to the U.S. this summer. Lastly, we have two pairs of Holly Brook’s skis and a pair for the World Cup Salomon rep. In all, we have 65 pairs of skis in four ski bags. One bag is 70lbs and the other three are around 50lbs. Here’s a cool shot Zach took of me with Tom Troutner who is wrestling some skis into a bag:

My incredibly generous friend Brayton Osgood (left below) drove me and all of the stuff to Boston. Brayton was home for the weekend visiting his parents. He was heading back to Boston where he is studying Accounting at Northeastern. He left home a day early to help me get to the airport.

In Boston we met up with Kris. Kris and I checked in on Lufthansa with seven total bags, just about all of which were at least a little bit overweight. Our agent was nice to us, not weighing a single bag. We got them all checked to Rovaniemi for $300; a steal! The first flight from Boston to Frankfurt was fast and easy; it was less than six and a half hours in the air. I spent most of the flight reading The Hunger Games. I finished the book just as we landed.