Off to Toulouse

Today is the day that my ‘countdown’ app finally read: 0 days. Time to fly to Toulouse to train for 5 weeks at Vincent Soubiron’s ski school. I’m obviously excited to ski so much every day, in nice temperatures and great coaching, so I will hopefully learn many things very quickly. I’m also really excited to see the people I met there last year again and see how they are doing. I also hope to meet new people there, since the water-skiing community in the Netherlands is not all that big. I really enjoy meeting new skiers from around the world and it will be good to meet other skiers from different countries before the Europeans, since the Dutch delegation will be very small. I look forward to being around even more people that share the same passion as me.

There were a couple of hurdles before I could finally fly to Toulouse though. First of all the 3-event bag always causes some kind of trouble every time I fly. This time was no different and it couldn’t be found in the system, so it took very long to check that bag in. Once that was finally sorted out, I went back to say goodbye to my grandparents and my mother. When going back in, my hand-luggage was selected to be weighed. This sucked, because I knew it was overweight and it wouldn’t have been checked if I just went straight through security after checking in my bags. I decided to leave my tablet at home and carry a book in my hand. This way the bags were still slightly overweight, but I got through! After came security, where both of my pieces of hand-luggage were selected for extra checking and I was also selected to be checked extra after the x-ray machine. To be fair, I understand why they needed to check my carry-on bag, because it’s not often that you see hard-shell bindings in carry-ons… This was necessary to spread the weight around my bags. This turned out perfectly since my check-in bag was 22.9kg and it is allowed to be 23kg. After way too long I was finally through security and instead of having an hour or two to spare, my flight was already called for boarding. I had originally planned to write part of this blog, whilst waiting for boarding, but there was no time, so I’m writing it on the plane. I knew that when I arrived in Toulouse, it would be too much fun to see all the people that I wouldn’t write it there. I was supposed to land at 13:30, so there would’ve been time to write it, but I’m glad I made the decision to write in the plane, because I landed after 16:00 due to a thunderstorm! The storm caused heavy turbulence, and it was not safe to land. The plan was to circle around until the storm passed, but we were out of fuel and got diverted to Carcassonne for re-fuelling. The turbulence we experienced whilst trying to land the first time was almost similar to some of the rides at the fun-fair in my home town. It’s another story I can add to my travel experiences, though I’m annoyed it reduced the time I could spend with my friend here in Toulouse.

I have set some goals for the next couple of weeks, which will help me reach the qualifying criteria for the European championships in July. I hope to be able to show these results so constantly that I can ski them at the nationals, because my grandparents are coming to watch those, and of course I want to impress them, and also show others why I missed their birthdays….

I'm looking forward to posting about my progress and taking some action shots! These will be posted next week, so stay tuned!