Cleaning up before we go

This vacation is a full Swedish culture immersion for the Juniors. Here they are helping clean up Torpet before we leave.

Pics from Blekinge

Packed like Sardines in the Car

"Torpet", the Hakansson's Guesthouse where We Stayed

Getting Ready to go Orienteering at Sand Dunes along the Baltic

The Baltic Sea

John, Alison, and Huw at Torpet

All of Us with the Hakansson's (and Ake)

Having Eva-Lisa's Incrediable Swedish Meatballs

Sunny days in the south of Sweden!

For the past few days our group has been enjoying some beautiful weather in Branke-H0by in the very southern tip of Sweden. We have been staying with the Hakansson family (Nils-Arne, Eva-Lisa, Birgitta, and Birgitta's boyfriend Mats-Ake) at their home Torpet. It has been a very pleasant stay and our hosts, as always have been wonderful. I believe that every one has especially enjoyed Eva-Lisa's cooking - one thing is for sure we are all being well fed over here in Sweden.

Our days in Branke-Hoby have been a bit slower paced and relaxing, but very enjoyable. We took a very nice tour of the city of Karlskrona and visted the Marinemuseum there. The juniors and my mother also got their first sight and (very cold) swim in the Baltic Sea as well. Of course we have done some orienteering as well while we were here and we have been treated to the very diverse terrain of the Blekinge province - soft, mossy forrest with lots of rocks to sand dunes!

We have had a very nice time down here, in Branke-Hoby and we will be sad to go, but we will see our friends again at Oringen! After lunch today we will be leaving for Goteborg to stay for 2 nights with Bigitta's sister Cecilia and then we will be heading up to Oslo for a couple of days - then Oringen!

If I have some time before we leave after lunch I will upload some more pictures...in the meantime you should check out the US Team's blog for the World Orienteering Championships that are going on right now at http://usa-orienteering.blogspot.com/. They have been doing a much better job at keeping their blog updated than we have. Go USA!!!

Until we meet again...

If you couldn't tell from the pictures that were just posted, we were finally able to get hooked up to the internet on my laptop at the clubhouse. One of the OK Tyr club members came by at around midnight last night and hooked it up for us (thank you, thank you, thank you!) It was perfect timing as well since we are taking this morning off before our long courses tonight so I had the chance to up load some pics and post them.

Last night everyone ran well, despite some technical problems with the course setting. Two of the controls codes were switched and one of those controls were hung wrong as well. Almost every course shared at least one of those controls too so everyone got to the control and did a bit of head scratching because the code was wrong. Unfortunately, they will have to throw the courses that were affected by this error out, which is a shame because many of the juniors ran quite well (myself included!)

Tonight's race is a chase start and the courses will be about 1km longer than they have been so that is why we are taking the morning off. It is our final race in Karlstad before our little group of Americans parts ways until the Oringen.

Here is where every one is off to next: The Childs family along with Gabe, Nate, Emily, and Anna are departing after our race tonight for Stockholm - all, (except Anna, who is heading off to the Czech Republic for the WOC spectator race) are then taking a ferry to Finland to run the Fin-5 and then heading to Oringen. Randy and Tourgney (our Swedish friend that has been training with us) are heading back to Tourgney's family and picking up Molly and then heading off to explore the Norwegian fjords. Our group (Janet, Corinne, Alison, Huw, and John) are departing Saturday morning for Branke-Hoby on the very southern tip of Sweden to stay a few days with the Hakansson family and the on to Gothenborg for a night and then on to Oslo for some sightseeing before heading to Oringen.

See everyone at Oringen soon!

Photos at last!

first attempt at packing the car...

on the the ship "Chapman" at our hostel

in Gamla Stan (Old City)

receiving instructions from Tom

training day 2

after running training

Relay/Sprint Training with Tom

John

Corinne, Gabe, Alison, Anna

BBQ with Swedish OK Tyr Juniors

Gabe and Tom grilling hotdogs

Training in Karlstad

I don't think any of us anticipated how difficult or expensive it would be to access the internet on our trip, but it is the unfortunate truth. Hence, the very sparse postings on our part. Hopefully while we are visitng with the Håkansson family in Bränke-Holby we will be able to give a more detailed account of the last week, plus get some pictures uploaded.

So now we are in Karlstad, staying at the OK Tyr club house (Tom Hollowell's club in Karlstad). We are training in the morning with Tom and then running the OK Tyr's mini-5 day's in the evenings. Untill this morning there were 17 Americans gathered at the club house, but we lost Andy Strat and Holly Kunester this morning as they departed for Poland. As far as I can tell everyone is having a great time and running very well in their races. Some of the juniors are even winning in their categories. It must be said that OK Tyr has gone far and beyond the call of hospitatlity for our group. Not only have they offered us the use of their club house, which required that their juniors spend a day cleaning out an entire cabin for us to sleep in, but they also hosted a BBQ after yesterday's Sprint at this gorgeous spot on a nearby lake. The juniors are currently working out a nice gift for the club to show our appreciation.

Tom has also done an excellent job with the training. The exercises have been fun, the terrain beautiful, and the lessons learned highly informative. The 5-days courses have been equally good. My first two races have not been the cleanest and my times have been quite slow, but I still finished each race having greatly enjoyed myself. I'm glad to say that the juinors have been racing better than I have too!

Our trip out to Karlstad is noteworthy since we had an interesting time trying to locate the club house. We departed on Tuesday morning with nothing more to go on than that we needed to drive to Karlstad (3 hr trip) and then hope that we could find everyone once we got there. Unfortunately, the number that we had to call was not working so once we reached Karlstad we were at a bit of a loss for what to do. I'll spare you the gorey details, but after some deliberation we ended up just driving to a grocery store and asking the cashier. He did not know where the club house was, but he knew of a field where "your kind of people" often congregate. There were not orienteers at said field when we got there, but there was a police station right next to it. We got a map and directions that got us pretty close to the cabing, but not on the right road. After asking a Swedish woman at her bike along this dirt road we were on we got the directions we needed. The woman didn't know english very well so she gave us all of the directions in Swedish and just said "left" at the end of it. She pointed it out on the map too so we were able to find our way to the OK Tyr club house.

We have two more races of the 5-days. Todays race and then tomorrow's is a chase start based on our 3 fastest races and then we all go our separate ways till Oringen.

Almost out of internet!!!!! Hejdor!!!!!

Just a quick note

so we have yet to tell you about our second day in Stockholm, but not enough time right now to do so. Just wanted to let everyone know we are know in Karlstad with Tom Hollowell for the training camp. Holly, Andy, Anna, Gabe, the Childs, Emily Kemp and her dad were already here. We ran a event last night and all seamed to have a good time. Did some training today with the compass, now in town. Later tonight we are off to do a sprint race and than BBQ and swiming with some of the Swedish juniors. In the train station so cannot add any photos but we will keep trying to find a time to do so.

All have a blast and have many stories to tell when there is more time.

First day in Stockholm

So we have a rental car, which I can already tell will be a blessing and a burden. When we went to pick it up we expected that a GPS would be included in the rental which was not the case. Renting one for the entire trip would cost as much as buying one outright so we decided not to get one. I did the driving since, my Mom is a bit out of practice with driving a standard. Since my car back home is stick, I figured it would be less difficult for me to drive and try to figure out what European road signs mean. A side note: we barely got all of our luggage into our car.



The driving on the highway to Stockholm was pretty straightforward, but with Mom, our fearless leader doing the navigating from the frontseat, things got a little hairy once we hit the city. After missing a number of turns and probably pulling a few illegal moves (I swear I'm getting better with the signs every time) we ended up on a tunnel going under an island and were actually leaving the city. If you can only picture me yelling frantically where to go, my Mom yelling back that she can't read the map, Alison and Huw still chatting away and John snapping pictures at everything we drove past then you have a pretty good idea of what that car trip was like. Eventually we found our way to the hostle and got all settled in.

By the time we arrive to the hostel we still had time to go sightseeing for few hours, and after we found an ATM to get money we headed over to Djurgården to the Vasa Museum. The Vasa ship was HUGE and the museum itself very impressive. The museum was literally built around the ship. We took a short ferry ride back to our island, Skeppsholmen, ate dinner, and then Mom and I promptly passed out. John, Alison, and Huw stayed up later, like teenagers usually do, and hung out around the waterfront and did a little exploring.

We have to go for now, we'll post more tomorrow and hopefully include some photos! Heydor!

Flights Part 2

Here is the story of Janet and my flights. It first started off though with quite a long car ride to JFK. We were all right up until right before the airport where there was some sort of accident, thankfully we left plenty of time so were fine with not missing our flight. Than we got there went all the way up to check in and Janet left her phone in the car so Denny had to go get it while we stood in line. While he was gone Janet with her big backpack hit the retractable cords to form the line and it went flying back and made us both laugh quite hard. We also saw some very funny suitecases, one bright pink the other zebra. Checked in fine so that was good and got through security with no problem. We then sat around for quite some time before our flight and realised then we had forgotten Huw's flight info so was trying to figure out how to meet up with him. Got on the plane, watched some movies, little sleep, and arrived uneventful. We then went to find out Huw's gate and went there and he wasn't there. went to our gate then and thank god cus we had to go through security AGAIN, which was annoying. after that sat around praying that Huw would show up. After about 10 or so minutes he showed up. We all then got on the plane and it was quite uneventful from than on. Huw and I didn't stop talking on the plane and we were all 'very excited to finally be going to Sweden. Got there and had no problem finding Corinne and John. Then off to get the car...

An all-too eventful journey

I should begin by saying that we all arrived here safe and sound and with only minor mishaps. Where to begin...well I'll speak for myself first. Not only did I have interesting travels, but I met many interesting people along the way, like the disgruntled German woman on the bus to the airport that swore the bus driver stole her money, and then there was the Korean man with touretts at the airport who had a tic and kept repeatedly shouting out "hai" or something like that. Then there was my favorite, the stereotypical Texan on the plane. He was loud, rude, and all around obnoxious. My favorite moment was when he was sitting there reading Maxim next to his teenage daugther. Classy.

All of these delightful encounters only added to the fun of the actual travleing. So when I arrived at BWI for my first flight, I realized that I had less than an hour to make my second flight out of Philly. Fortunately, I was able to talk to John, who was on the same flight out of Philly so he knew I would be calling it close, but we failed to communicate well enough about where we would be meeting. Once I landed I had about 30 min to make it to my gate-for those of you who know the Philly airport I exited my first plane at the very end of the F terminal and my flight to Stockholm departed from the very end of the A terminal-and I was able to catch a shuttle with no problem. Unfortunately, John decided he would meet me in the F terminal, but I cruised right out of the gate to the shuttle and we missed each other. When I arrived to the A terminal, John was no where to be found. I must have looked crazy because I circled the waiting area about 3 times. I was near a heart attack when almost everyone had boarded the plane and there was still no sign of John, but just as I had to board he came running down to the gate. Crisis averted. The rest of the flight was pretty un-eventful, which was a welcom break.