Thursday, March 17, 2011

Mora Ski Gymnasium

I left for Sweden on Tuesday, met up with Greg at the JFK airport, and we finished the trip across the Atlantic puddle and got to Mora by Wednesday sort of mid day. Erik Svensson and the Mora Ski Gymnasium have been kind enough to put us up for a couple days, and invited us to join them for all the trainings that they're doing. It's a really sweet setup, and makes a lot of logistics actually much easier than if I were trying to plan things myself. We're staying in a dorm in the basement of one of the ski dorms, and it's way more than I expected. Cristina got here Thursday afternoon, and there may even be sightings of an Ali by Saturday!

At least the main room is quite big - enough room for two couches, a table, and two bunkbeds. Living in style!Looking the other way.

The apartment comes with a very large kitchen. Better than a lot of places I've seen, actually!

mmmm sunshine.

Greg catches a quality nap on the train.

The first thing we did was hit up a grocery store for the essentials, like nutella.
Greg doesn't really have standards when it comes to food. I find nutella-cheese-baloney-jam sandwiches weird. Cheese-wrapped fried meatballs, on the other hand, are purely delicious.

We did a little skiing, too. Turns out, they groom a snowmobile path from the Mora dorms to the Vassaloppet trails, so Wednesday afternoon we went exploring on those. That was fun, but joining the ski-o kids Thursday was more fun. Basically, they get driven to a map, that has some custom ski trails on it, and they were doing two sprints, so we joined them. I can safely say that I was the second (of two) girls on that course. The entire thing was windy narrow trails - spectacular. Good rolling terrain, enough uphills to make you try hard and enough downhills to keep you on your toes. We went back in the afternoon to do a line-o, and that was also hard. My actual reading of the map isn't so bad right now, but I was unable to keep focus. Hopefully more sleep, less jetlag, and more coffee will fix that before WOC!


Cristina came prepared - with night vision goggles. I didn't get it either.

The snowmobile groomer, with one of the coaches ("trainers") waiting for the kids to start the workout.

The woods are beautiful. Supposedly it will snow a lot tomorrow, but today was sunny, if not all that warm. Swedish junior skier whooshing through the woods.

I'll leave you with this one - amazing the things you can find in a Swedish grocery store. We had to import the Greg-in-tights, and the scimitar came with the apartment, but you can get huge chunks of sausage (it tasted like hotdogs).

1 comment:

cjross said...

I am also skeptical of most of Greg's sandwich combinations! Great photos and good luck this week!