Euro Day 21 - Dolomites to Trieste

Monday, 15 July 2019

I'm writing this blog from Croatia - it's been a big few days!  

The final day of the Dolomites 3 days was as beautiful as all the previous ones. We arrived fairly early as Zali had an early start. Even the car parking was beautiful:

The fallen trees in the background (on the left) are a common sight in the Dolomites at the moment as they had a big storm in October last year which knocked down huge areas of forest.  The forest industry is busy harvesting the fallen timber and clearing the blocked roads.   

The kilometre walk down to the arena was delightful too:

 The rest of us had later starts so we could soak up the atmosphere of the arena before heading off to the start. The map was in the same area that was used for JWOC 2009, so it was a good area and completely different to the other days. I was expecting a bit of a challenge with the reduced visibility in the forest.

I was pretty keen to get started, and also pretty nervous. I really wanted to keep a podium spot so I could take home a souviner from the event.  I was in a good position overall but it was still possible to lose it all with a few dumb mistakes, which over 17 controls is pretty easy to do!  My plan was to be as safe as possible - it didn't matter if didn't get a place, as long as I wasn't miles behind.   The map was pretty steep and had some interesting rock detail - this is Zali's course which was similar to mine:

And generally I had an ok run.  I lost 2-3 minutes at one control when I found myself in a Bermuda triangle of lost orienteers in the middle of some huge rock pillars.  I'm pleased I managed to relocate and find my tiny boulder without losing too much time. Then near the end I was just a bit messy. But it was good enough and I was 6th on the day. Fortunately for me the people who beat me weren't close to me on the overall standings. So I made the podium - yay!  And the funny thing is that because they do men and women together I shared the podium with a Swiss guy who was really good and at JWOC in 1990 with Jon and I, and a Finnish guy who actually won JWOC that year! (they of course went on to bigger and better things like medals in the World Champs but whatevs!   Oh and I got a medal to take home as well as some local cheese and pasta - yum!

It was great that Zali also finished the event with her best run, Jett had another solid performance, and Jon had a fantastic run to finish 4th, not much off the pace.

We had to wait a while for the presentations so we didn't get back to the car until about 3.15, and we still had a bit of a drive to Trieste. We hit a really bad hail storm along the way too, so it was slow going. Once again Jon was a champion driver and we made it to our campsite just before 7. It was a pretty weird campsite but it did have a lovely view over Trieste:

By the time we'd set up camp and cooked dinner the sun had set on our 21st day in Europe.