I definitely appreciate the destination over the journey.
The travel to Italy was gruelling despite no real delays or problems. My mum was travelling with me and we had a
great and exhausting stop over in New York. The first leg was about 27 hours
door to door. We stopped in LA for a couple of hours from around 2am NZ time.
It doesn’t make for great sleeping. New York was fantastic. We saw all the main
sights, but three days was pretty light. We stayed in a cheap hotel just steps
away from Times Square and went to a couple of Broadway shows, saw the Statue
of Liberty, the new World Trade Centre, the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton at the
American Museum of Natural History, Central Park, Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Guggenheim, the Met, Madame Tossaud’s, etc, etc.
From New York mum and I travelled to London where we took
separate connection flights. Mum went to Rome to join an organised tour of Italy
for 10 days. I went to Toulon to do a little training and recover from the jet
lag with my training buddy from Fielding who has recently returned home to
France. Two flights, two buses, two trains, and about 24 hours later I arrived at
my destination. It was another tiresome journey with the stop over in the
middle of the night, rendering me practically unable to sleep. I was staying
with Olivier, a member of the local freediving club who has a home in Le Pin de
Galle, perched on the edge of a hill just a few steps from the beach. It was
lovely and really tested my memory of French. Romain and I managed a few
training sessions, although some were aborted due to my general state of
well-being (or lack of). I spent five days in Toulon and managed to catch up on
a bit of rest and was starting to feel a little more normal by the time we
departed. I suffered quite a lot in the heat, expecting it to be cooler at this
time of year and coming from a country where it’s the end of winter. I had to
purchase a skirt and some shoes to avoid perishing in the sun.
Another 12 hours of travelling involving a car, two
flights and two buses and we arrived at our final destination of Lignano
Sabbiadoro in the North of Italy near Venice. This is the location for the AIDA
Indoor Freediving World Championships 2011.
I don’t cope well with lost sleep but was lucky to feel
pretty normal again after spending a couple of days in Lignano. It’s a shame to
lose 2 weeks of training prior to such a big event, but I’m sure my body will
remember just fine.
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