My sister was right, I would start this blog and for the first month it would be great and then I would stop posting... So now I must catch up on the missed weeks (and weeks)
Voss Extreme Sports festival (VEKO) was from june 25-july 5 with Ahsley coming to visit me from France and take part in the festivities. It should really be called voss endurance week... Every night there was some sort of event that included the video of all of the extreme sport competitions from the day and then a band. Each night was an "unmissable" party, so after 9 days it took its toll... The rafting center was in charge of the 2 days worth of rafting races. The first day was the European cup there was a slalom, sprint, and head to head race. There were points giving for placing in each race and then the top 3 mens and womens teams won awards. At the last minute my housemates and Ashley decided to enter a team. We had never been in a boat together and on the first slalom run went into a big hole in the first rapid, dumptrucked the boat and ended up finishing the race with only 2 paddles, it was a bit of a disaster. The second slalom run we finished with everyone in the boat and all the paddles. We made a tremendous come back and ended up winning the sprint and the head to head races. The Norwegian national team was less then impressed... The combination of all our races earn us 6500 NOK with a tied first place finish.
The second day was the Amazing raft race which was not only having to get down the river but having to complete some tasks along the way. These tasks included one person drinking 1.5 L of milk, guiding blindfolded and backwards down a rapids and undressing to your underwear and singing the YMCA song on the side of the road. I was guiding a team made up of high school girls and we ended up in 5th place out of 10 teams! There was also a few kayak races but I was unable to arrange time off work to race. Maybe a good thing because the course ended up being on a very difficult section of the Raundal. Out of the 75 entered competitors, only 35 competed and 17 swam. Only 1 female completed the course and Ashley was the only other one to try (but sadly didnt complete it).
After working on the Sunday I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep for days. But I was off to France the next morning and had to catch a 5:30am train. The night was instead filled with cleaning, packing, doing laundry and few needed hours of sleep.
Photos:
Norwegian Sadie
kayaking course
kayaking course
Voss local dish: smoked sheep head
A video of the European cup race can be found here: http://www.nrk.no/nett-tv/indeks/220621/
Because our raft dumptruck the first time the TV channel focused the cameras on us hoping for more action...
