Euro Day 43 - SOW Day 1

Monday, 5 August 2019

What a fun day we had today.  We raced the only (unfortunately!) sprint race we'll have as part of this week, held at the event centre (and very expensive town) of Gstaad.  For us this meant a drive down to Chateaux D'oex then the 24 minute train ride.  The view from our local train station was pretty nice:

All the trains and other transport is free for us as participants, and the train that happened to come along was a ye-olde type of train, with wooden panelling on the inside and quaint little lamps on all the tables. We have about 5 stations between us and Gstaad, so along the way we picked up more and more orienteers which was fun.

The race was held all around the town - thankfully most of us started up high and worked our way downhill to the finish.  I had an ok run - a bit messy but not too bad. Jon and Paul made a few decent sized mistakes, and the kids were pretty fine although Zali lost an expensive minute on one of the controls.  Nevertheless we all really enjoyed it!  They had to practically shut the town down to cars all day which was impressive, but we still had to dodge legitimate tourists in the streets.  This is a the organisers video wrap up of the day

We got home by 2ish, so we had time to relax and play cards in the afternoon. Paul went out for a long walk, and I went out for a very short walk around our local streets.  The weather in the last few days has been sensational. 

I stopped to chat to some Swiss bird watchers who were standing quite near our house.  They come from Geneva and own a nearby chalet so I mentioned that they were very lucky to live somewhere so beautiful.  They said 'Oh - Tasmania is beautiful too!'. It's pretty impressive that so many people have heard of Tasmania.   They also mentioned that they had noticed we 'made some laundry today' - I said yep, we'll probably be making it every day! They were amazed we were on holidays for 8 weeks. It is amazing and it's hard to imagine that we'll be home in just two weeks!