Spring!

As I said last week, I thought I would ski on Monday in Handel. However there was a code yellow weather warning throughout the country, which means heavy storms. Due to this driving wasn't really recommended, and even if we were to drive 5 hours, skiing was definitely out of the picture. Now I skied on Saturday, but since my mind was set on skiing Monday, the 4 days before Saturday felt like forever. In the end it was worth the wait, because the weather was the opposite of last week. There was a lot less wind and today the temperature hit 21 degrees Celsius! The little

wind that was there helped to dry my suit in between sets, so I didn't mind that much. With this temperature, in combination with the fake alligator that was on the ramp, I thought I was back in Florida! Only the water temperature lags a little behind Florida, but it was around 10 degrees, so with a good wetsuit it was bearable.
Saturday was a lot colder, even though the weatherman predicted 18 degrees, it was actually 12… The silver lining was that it was not super busy, so I was able to ski 2 sets, even though we started late. There was still work to be done on the slalom course and sadly there were not many people to help so this took some time. The skiing started at 17.00, so I was happy to still be able to ski 2 sets. I had contacted the Dutch coach to see she could come as well. This way we could work on a new trick run that will get me into Europeans. We had a lot of time to work on this, so it should be flawless now. Then I had two trick sets to put it into practise, but for the second time this year in the cold temperatures, it looked no where near what I had in mind haha. I enjoyed it thoroughly nonetheless, because I waited long enough to start skiing again. After my last ski set, we quickly had to drive the caravan to the camping, otherwise it would be dark when we were setting up, which makes it unnecessarily hard. We had just enough light to set up my second home in the other side of the country. I was sure we would forget something, at first we were really scared it was the power cable, without it there would be no water, heater, light, etc. Luckily it was a little less dramatic, but we did forget the games, so we had to improvise. We managed to have a lot of fun anyway, so after a good nights sleep, we were ready for Sunday. On Sunday the skiing itself already went much better, maybe the weather had something to do with that :).
Besides the skiing it was also fun to see all the people that are members of this club. It was great to catch up with everybody and ride along in the boat with the other skiers. Especially in the sun this is one of the best ways to spend time in between sets. One of the things I talked about was with a photographer Jacky Jongenelen (action2.nl) to ask if she could shoot some pictures of me skiing some time. I'm excited to have some good quality pictures. She is also going to be a photographer at the under 21 European and African championship, all the more reason to qualify!