I’ve never been much of a traveler, in fact, I hate
traveling. I never get excited about going new places, seeing new things, or
being in new environments. For some people it is a life-long dream to be able
to see the world, but for me, I’m just here for the competitions and developing
myself as a professional triathlete. I have taken a few pictures though, so
hopefully with the next couple blogs and photos you can live vicariously
through me and enjoy this experience as well.
So after my Mazatlan (Mexico) race, I came home to Santa
Cruz for two days to get a little bit of training in and finish getting ready
for my 10 week European adventure. Surprisingly I got everything handled that
needed to be taken care of and before I knew it I was on my way. After a long
10hr flight from San Francisco to London (sitting next to an annoying drunk
dude) I had to run (with my express pass in hand) through the terminal to get
to my gate on time. Not only did I have an extremely short layover, our SFO
flight was delayed. Long story short I was literally three minutes late to the
gate and missed my flight and had to wait in line for an hour to get another flight
which wasn’t for another two hours and that flight also got delayed over an
hour. I had to use the “pay per minute” internet at the airport to be able to
email the guy who was picking me up in Nice and corrected my arrival time from
6 pm to 10pm. We ended up getting back to my house at about 1130pm, and in
France, everything closes at about 8pm. At this point, I have been traveling
for about 18hrs, I’m starving and have no food, I have no internet or phone (or
charger to charge my ipod or computer), I don’t speak any French, and I’m all
by myself. I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t even unpack, I just climbed in
bed (which didn’t have any sheets or pillow cases or anything) and went to
sleep.
The next day I woke up extremely early and was wide awake
because jet lag is a female dog. I unpacked everything except my bike (because
we were leaving at 3am the very next day to fly to a race), went for a run, and
then waited until 8am when the little market next to where I live opened. At 8
I bought some food and got ready to hitch a ride to the pool (which is about
7-8k away) with some non-English speaking people I was told to meet. That was
interesting and a pretty funny experience, but we made it to the pool and
luckily there are a couple brothers, Karl and Raoul Shaw, on the Grand Prix
team who are completely bi-lingual (French/English) which made things much
better. We had a nice easy 3k swim (because we were racing the next day in
Sables d’olonne) and right after the swim when I got home I ate the rest of my
food, packed for the race, and got in bed with an alarm set for 2am (Sables d’olonne race report).
Everyone at St. Raphael Tri club has been awesome and helped
me out a lot. There have been quite a few misunderstandings already, but the
pros outweigh the cons and after a week I am getting in the rhythm of things.
Not a very exciting post, but an update as to where I am at
as of now. Stay tuned for race reports.
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