Silly Billies Return to Roam

Chris and I arrived in Warsaw airport having spent an energetic weekend frolicking the hills of Switzerland during the Swiss mountain bike orienteering champs near Bern. I had really enjoyed the courses there - lots of good big hills to grind up and then racing down easy tracks through green paddocks. Heaps of time to look at the map for where to go next but tricky enough to still be a challenge. Unfortunately I knew that in Poland I faced extremely tricky track networks on flat sandy terrain, not so much my cup of tea. We met Cath (fellow Kiwi team mate) at the airport and hung around till Georgia and Rob and Marquita turned up. We loaded all our gear into the van and headed off on the 3 hour drive to Nowa Kaletka for a week of training on similar maps. We met Michael Woods at the cabin, he had arrived a few hours earlier. In the morning it was out into the forest and for me things immediately felt hard; tricky track networks, hard to see tracks and lots of difficult 'off roading...

I write this time from the comfortable home of Julian and Jana in Freiburg. We arrived here two weeks ago and have spent our time enjoying a few good beer gardens, weaving our way through lots of the dark singletrack forests of the Schwarzwald and enjoying the sights of picturesque Freiburg. Within about 5 minutes here you can be out in the forest and away from the city. There are two bigs hills on either side which make good climbs: the Schwarzkopf or the Rosskopf. Both are over 500 m high and are covered in a network of rideable tracks. The first weekend here Julian and Jana headed off to a wedding in Manheim while Chris and I had a lazy weekend biking and watching movies on their projector. We headed out with Julian for some interesting orienteering training on Tuesday evening. (Some controls were stray and the planner seemed to have decided to avoid the forest?) We wandered into town one weekday to the market around the majestic Muenster cathedrale and sampled some delicious cheese...