Australia Update

We left Victoria Thursday night, and after the 12 minute flight to Vancouver, we boarded our 15hr Air Canada flight to the land down under. When we arrived we had to pass quarentine, which was a hassle. They have sniffing dogs everywhere to smell out food. One found me because I had had a turkey sandwich in there at the Vancouver airport. The lady searched my entire bag top to bottom, and when she found nothing, she still insisted that I had something in there, so she searched it again. The whole time I am telling here that I had fruit and a turkey sandwich in there 15 hours ago. Finally she let me go stating that it must have been the remanents of that turkey sandwich.

After quarantine is when the real fun began. We were supposed to fly from Sydney to Brisbane at 10am, but we didnt make that flight, so the group was booked over three flights. Lucky me, I ended up on the last one at 4pm, so I was stuck with a handfull of others in the Sydney airport for 6 hours after a day of travelling. The only good thing that came out of that was some very fierce games involving a tennis ball. This included hurling it as hard a we could trying score between the oposing team, target practice, volleyball, and cricket. The airport people finally pulled the plug on us at cricket when we were hitting the ball a ways through the terminal. That killed a few hours, although it did leave everyone who played with very sore shoulders for the next few days. We finally made it to our hotel at 7:30pm, where upon i went to bed and was k'od for the next 12 hours.

Training has steadily been getting better. It takes a while to recover after a day and a half of travelling, but the legs/arms are starting to come around. I have had some effortless sessions in the pool, and my legs are starting to get that spring back in them.

Yesturday we went to a protected park for a run. We saw a few kangaroos and wallabies, but we didn't see any koala bears, and we were looking. A couple people almost took a spill because they were running while looking up at he trees.

Today is the U23 race, which officially marks the beginning of the World Championships.

So until later,
CH