Slovaneia
More adventure was had in the tortuous 12-and-a-half hour drive from France to Germany to switch rental cars because we needed special insurance to cross the Slovenian border, than was had in the race. For me anyway, because I front-flatted in the qualifier. HAVE A NICE DAY. See you next time you’re in Slovenia. More of that in a minute.....
Elke Brusaert and I made the mistake of following our 22-year old teammate from Lets Gets to Munich, which was supposed to be about 5 hours away. And in the 11th hour, after uncountable vague directions from non-English-speaking people and consistently confusing road signs, we found our frayed-selves idling in front of a "FLOODING--ROAD CLOSED" sign. It was the only way. And it was 2:00AM and we were exhausted to the point of hysterics. So I looked at Elke and floored the thing through the bright yellow signs and we parted the Red Seas of Germany with our little white Volkswagon rentals. We were going to find this hotel if we had to drive through the nearby Serbian forces to do it. Yup, the boys were following us now. After battling the floods and the translation gaps and the gas tank indicators and even the underlying war between man and woman and with humanity in general, we made our last concentric circle around the target, and victoriously arrived at the nucleus. And then we had a little trouble parking, too.
The climax of the next day would certainly be the border crossing into the forbidden land of Slovenia, a former East Block Yugoslavian province. But the guards didn’t really care about us, although one woman had raced the downhill the week before and said it was so muddy that "I LOOK LIKE PIG!" . With that done, all we could do was check out the countryside and later try to spend money. The U.S. dollar works very well here. I got one of my shoes repaired for less than 70 cents. But we still couldn’t buy more space in our miniature hotel rooms. Just another reality check for Americans livin’ a little too large....
So the race course was excellent, in fact the designer said that if HE could ride it, than it had to be changed. There were several jumps that even intimidated the men (but not me..... because I went around them) and a couple compressions that threw riders off the bikes through sheer G-forces. I felt great on this course I think because I have some heritage in Lithuania, which isn’t that far away, relatively. But one of my Lithuanian relatives must have (escaped), thus explaining my front flat. By the way, front flats are very hard to race on especially on off-camber traverses, which were riddled throughout course. Ten to fifteen crashes later, despite my efforts to stay on course by banking off the course poles, I was on my road bike towards Croatia to "get things in perspective".