Enough about racing…. Those are all results that you can find on the internet! How about a little behind the scenes in the life of a bobsledder on tour! And, so you all know, this is being written from the Lufthansa lounge in Frankfurt because, after driving 7 hours to Munich on Sunday to fly out on Monday morning, the flights were so delayed that a couple of us missed our connecting flight in Frankfurt back to Canada! I cannot wait to get home to be with my family for the holidays, but frustrations subsided when I saw the news talking about the volcano in the Philippines… I am safe and my family is safe! I will get home eventually!! So the good news is that I have time to update you on some of the off-ice adventures we’ve had over the past couple of weeks.
This sport is certainly not a glamorous one. On top of all of the sled-work we do – sanding/polishing all of the runners, and lifting/carrying/flipping the nearly 400 lbs sleds in/out of trucks, to the start line, in the garage to do work on it, etc., we also have to drive our sled trucks from town to town between races. On our 7 hour drive to Munich, our windshield wiper fluid wasn’t working – everything was frozen. When it got really bad in terms of visibility, while still driving on the autobahn, I leaned out the passenger window to throw water on the windshield, but it froze as soon as it hit the windshield! It only took a couple of stops along the highway before the misting turned into snow, at which point our windshield wasn’t the reason for no visibility anymore!!
The drives between races are usually long. From Cesana, Italy to Winterberg, Germany was about a 9 hour drive. From Winterberg, Germany to Altenberg, Germany it would have been a 5 hour drive if we hadn’t made a little stop on the side of the road! And by ‘little’, I mean almost 2 hours and not by choice! Until that day, I didn’t really understand how anyone could actually run out of gas while driving! I mean, who does that?! Apparently, we do! Alas…. It is possible! Although Kaillie was driving, she tried to blame me for making such a good mixed cd that we were too busy singing along to notice the light come on in the truck. Time was just flying by, and it didn’t seem like we’d been driving for that long. When she finally noticed the light, it still looked like we had enough so we just decided to stop at the next gas station along the autobahn. Well….. there weren’t any gas stations for awhile and we about 100 km away from Dresden when the truck came to a stop! We couldn’t believe it! Amanda tried to make us feel better by saying that it had happened to her before! For some reason that didn’t surprise me! LOL
Amanda and I jumped out of the truck and within 3 minutes she flagged down a car…. With a man who spoke zero English! And although I am learning a little bit of German, I quickly realized that besides ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘what time is it’, nothing I had learned was really appropriate for that situation or to use with a stranger!
The man drove us about 5 km to the next gas station and waited for us. The lady behind the counter was not the least bit useful – half yelling at us in German like we understood what she was saying! We decided to get both gas and diesel because we didn’t know which the truck took. (I never drive the trucks over there because they’re standard and carrying about 100k worth of sleds and equipment!) But…. There was only one gas can left. So…. We decided to take the gas. WRONG! The man drove us all the way back (total round trip of about 20 minutes), and Kaillie sent us back because the truck took diesel! The man waved us back to his car and ended up taking us to his house (WAY out in the middle of nowhere), got his own gas can, drove us back to the gas station to get diesel, and then drove us back to our truck where he filled the truck for us so that we weren’t standing on the autobahn in the dark! Although we had already bought him a coffee (the first time ‘round), we gave him the gas we had originally bought, as well as a couple of photo cards we had in our bags. In the car I had been thinking how sketchy our situation could be, and wondered what my mother would think of this ordeal. But then I realized that sometimes one just has to have a bit of faith in mankind! Not all strangers are bad! Sometimes they’re just “friends you haven’t met yet”!
We got back in the truck to finish our drive and playing on the radio was “Angels Among Us” by Alabama! How appropriate!
