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Perianne Jones - The Making of a Champion: Hurry up and Wait!
By:  Perianne Jones   (2006/12/22)

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Perrianne Jones is a member of the National Ski Team. Peri is from Almonte and grew up skiing with the various local ski clubs. She is now living in Canmore (AB) where she shares a house with Olympic Gold medalist Chandra Crawford. They should be a deadly duo at Vancouver in 2010.

In this series of articles she shares some insight into her life for the Ottawa ski community on the Fresh Air Experience website, and reprinted here with their permission.

The good news is we have arrived in Davos, our Christmas Holiday training location. The bad news is our luggage is still not here and it took us an extra day to get here. I won't give you the entire story, but I will highlight some of the more interesting parts of our travel day(s).

So, first of all this is what was supposed to happen: fly from Salt Lake City-Calgary-London/Heathrow-Zurich-drive to Davos.

This is what ended up happening in the end, although it took a little longer than we had intended. Things went very smoothly for the North American portion of our travel, but as soon as we arrived in London things went downhill fast.

As we were trying to go through security in London we were informed that our flight from London to Zurich was cancelled due to fog, this meant that we had to somehow buy another ticket to Zurich. We didn't think this was such a big deal until we saw the line to the ticket counter. It was out the door, and there were multiple tents set up outside to protect the ticket buyers from the London fog. Instead of all of us waiting in this line Drew took one for the team and stood in line for almost four hours.

While he was waiting some of us stood in baggage claim lines, investigated other options for travelling to Zurich (apparantly the next flight was Friday afternoon…that was 3 days away), called Coach Dave-who called our travel agent in Canmore (where it was 3 AM), bought water and sandwiches to feed our hungry team, people watched, and waited. Finally after many phone calls to Dave we found out that our travel agent had booked us another flight which left that afternoon on a different airline.

We were very happy to hear this news, so Drew stepped out of the mega-line, which he still wasn't that close to the front of and we headed off to check in for our next flight. We thought we were in the clear until we tried to check in, and discovered that we had a "booking" but no tickets. With only half an hour to go before departure things were not looking good. Somehow Dan and Drew managed to talk their way in, and get us some tickets. This left us sprinting towards the security line (where we took the express lane - only 15 minutes long!), after security we sprinted to the gate to find yet another long line. Finally we boarded the plane which thankfully took off a lot later than it was supposed to.

Upon arrival in Zurich we met up with Coach Dave, and tried to figure out where our bags were with no success. Dave took us to a hotel in Zurich where we ordered pizza from Dominos! (the only food to be found at midnight in Zurich) It cost $120 for 3 large pizzas, but they were worth every penny and the long wait for delivery. We slept like logs and met up with our Massage Therapist, and Wax Tech in the morning who drove us to Davos.

Here in Davos things are great, the skiing is beautiful, the beds are comfy and the food is tasty. Yesterday Amanda and I bought some clothes at the grocery store (anywhere else it would have cost us a fortune) so we no longer have to wear our Norwegian sweaters and the same socks and underwear that we travelled in for 3 days. Our bags are still on the loose, we aren't really expecting to see them any time soon, on Wednesday there were 30,000 bags lost at Heathrow and it is still foggy so presumably that number has only grown. Hopefully things will arrive before the Tour starts!

The other big news is that the Tour de Ski has been shortened! There is very little snow in the Czech Republic, so the first two races have been cancelled, which is music to Chandra's and my ears, but not so much to some of the others. There are now only 6 races, which is much less daunting, and 2 of those races are sprints!

Now I can honestly say I'm look forward to the Tour De Ski!

Merry Christmas!
Perianne

Previous articles in this series...

 
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