Back to France

I know I’m backtracking a little here but whilst in Bourges there were a whole lot of things going on and all I wanted to do was go to sleep. The effects of coming down from altitude I think. So anyway, I have a few things that I need to tell you all about whilst I was in Bourges before my first Grand Prix race and also afterwards, before I cam e back to Spain.

TEZZA AND SHAZZA

Thierry is the bloke who picked me up from the airport. Poor Tezza had to wait for an extra two hours as my flight was delayed, but you’ll hear about that later. He is the club secretary, I think and is half of the pair known as Tezza and Shazza. It turns out that Tezza got his name from Fu and Jono G a few years back when they decided that everyone needed to have an “aussie” name. This is how Thierry became Tezza. I sort of lost the ball a bit when I met Tezza’s wife, Martine. Apparently the boys were unable to think of a decent aussie name that was close to Martine so they thought that something that went well with Tezza would be appropriate, hence the name Shazza.

Both have taken a liking to their new found Aussie names and Tezza even has “Tezza” embroidered into his club uniform.

Tezza and Shazza have only been married for a few years and each have two children. Tezza has two boys, and you guessed it, Shazza has two girls. They are a regular Brady Bunch, however they have never the seen the show the theme song sort of went over their heads. They live close to the middle of Boiurges in a cool three storey town house and at times all four kids are there, and at others there are no kids at all. I did manage to meet all of the children in my time in Bourges though and they are all really nice and speak different levels of English.

The family is the heart of the club and both Thierry and Martine do a hell of a lot of work for the team and also the club. There are a lot of junior members and I was able to gather that it is a great achievement to have a team in the First division in France. It seems that if they are not at work, then they are doing something involve with the club, yet they always have plenty of time for us Aussie boys should we need anything.

In the week after the race, Tezza had gone off on business and all of the kids were at their respective parents houses. This left Shazza at home all alone (except for Jimmy Attard who was the new adopted son) so Jon, Nicko and myself all went over for dinner, every night. This was handy as Shazza has a much better kitchen than ours and actually has an oven that you can use to cook in, rather than just to make toasted sandwiches in.

We were there Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and all took turns of cooking. I cooked the famous Rhodesy’s Lasagne which went down a treat as always… and on the final night before I left for Madrid Shazza cooked us all waffles. They were awesome and went down a treat with some Nutella and ice-cream. Thanks Shazza

JONO AND NICKO’S BITCHING

I’m pretty sure I told you all earlier that Jono and Nicko are cousins, but for the sake of this blog I feel that the point needs to be reiterated. However, I feel it would be more appropriate if they were in fact sisters instead.

With only a couple of years separating their age, it does not take Einstein to realise that the boys have spent a fair bit of their lives together. Both grew up in the same town, both do triathlon, and from the stories, both have spent time at each other place for extended periods at one time or another during their childhoods.

This although making them very close and good mates, also makes that behave like little girls a lot of the time with many a petty argument at the dining table, in the kitchen, in the lounge room, in the car, at the pool, and just about any other place that we went to.

Nah, it’s not that bad. But there is a fair bit of bickering that goes on during the day I just wanted an avenue to rip into them on my blog. So here it is boys!!! Or should I say girls…?

I can only imagine the tears that have been shed since my departure from the house in Bourges with no mediator to bring calm to the seemingly endless girly bitching that took place in my presence. I can only hope that both are still there upon my return and that one has not pulled the other’s hair, or dug their nails into the other’s arms, or called the other a slut, or kicked and bitch slapped the other in order to get their way.

In my opinion, our supermarket budget is big enough that we can have both flavours of biscuits boys….

FLYING WITH EASYJET

Just like the age old Valvoline saying “Oils ain’t Oils”, comes the latest, “easyjet ain’t easy”.

By the time I had worked out where I would be going and when I would be travelling after my time in Font Romeu, most of the flights available on the large commercial European airlines were far too expensive.

I had heard that there were quite a number of cheap airline operating in Europe so I looked up some of them and was able find a flight on easyjet. It was reasonably priced and the pricing system was rather amusing, I thought anyway.

The base price gives you a ticket only. From here you need to add the amount of baggage you want to travel with. Each bag is charged at 7.5 euros and you can pretty much have as many bags as you like, but if your baggage weight exceeds 20kg then you must pay for additional weight. You can also choose to have insurance for the flight which was about another 9 euros, speedy boarding which gets you onto the plane first for your choice of seat (there are no allocated seats), and also a charge to eliminate your carbon offset. Being the environmentalist that I am and also the fact that if I payed for the carbon offset, then the girl at the desk may be a little more lenient on the weight of my baggage I chose to fork out for the extra 2 euros. Go Green.

You can also travel with a bike on Easyjet flights but that will set you back another 25 euros. Not bad considering Spanish Airline Iberia now charge 150 euros per bike on any flight. The good thing about this is that for your 25 euros you also get an additional 12kg of luggage allowance.

Loges was driving Brendan down to catch his flight to Paris as well as he had to meet up with his French Team for their season launch. Such things are custom for the more economically advantaged teams, but not really something that Tri Sud 18 is really able to afford. Maybe next year.  Anyways, Fu was going down to Paris as well so I booked my flight a copuple of hours after his so that I could share the lift down to the airport in Barcelona. I had quite a few hours to kill in fact and spent most of them eating chocolate Prince biscuits and playing playstation on the ground, with the occasional stand and walk to relieve my numb bottom and walk off the calories that I was consuming at regular intervals.

After a few hours of this I thought it were about time to get ready to check in. The check in time was schedule as it is with all Easyjet flights, at 2 hours before the flight is scheduled to leave. I gave myself an extra 15mins or so as I thought if I get there a little early with my bike I might be able to beat the rush. I thought wrong…..

Upon entering the check in area for the “cheap airlines” I was greeted by a few hundred other passengers who obviously had the same idea as myself. The worst thing was that the lines for the flights were so long that they had reached the end of the designated area and began to curve around in an arc into the middle of the walkway. It was almost impossible to tell which line went where and who was flying with who. The next hour and a half was a very interesting, with people firstly trying to establish which line that they were to meant to be standing in. After realising that they were just like everybody else in the line and had to stand a good hour wait from the counter, they spent most of this time trying to weasel their way up the line to minimise the time that they had to wait. After what seemed like an eternity, I finally reached the point in the line where it became straight and I could see the counter in front of me. There may have been another fifty people in front of me but I could see the counter and was on the home stretch, or so I thought. A good 45 mins later I had finally made it to the front of the line. From here I only had to negotiate to get my bike on the place and I could be off to the gate lounge. This only took another 10 minutes which I thought was pretty good as it was obvious that the staff were under the pump. Easyjet don’t actually have their own check-in employees and rather employ the services of the staff at the airport to do the job for them. So somehow, I don’t really think that the staff of “flightcare” really give a shit whether my bike bag weighs 40kg or not. Good that.

After negotiating the throngs of soon to be travellers (maybe….) I was able to get the trolley and the bike to the oversize luggage door, maybe never to be seen again. And then I made my way up to the gate lounge as my flight was scheduled to depart in about a half hour. All I can say is thank god for my PSP.

After two hours of delays we were directed downstairs to hop onto a bus where we were driven out onto the tarmac and boarded our plane via the stairs. It seemed that the four flights that came into our gate lounge whilst we were waiting had occupied the skywalk. But before you knew it…….. was two hours after we were supposed to leave, we were off to Paris. I was soon out like a light and awoke close to landing thinking of how poor Tezza would have been waiting for an extra two hours for me.

I got off the flight and met Tezza who was waiting patiently for me. We waiting at the carousel for my bike not to arrive and then went and found somebody who could retrieve it for me. I was happy that Tezza was there as he speaks good French (funny that) and was able to get the bike from out the back somewhere. Winner!!! Don’t know what I would have done if he wasn’t there.

SWIMMING IN BOURGES

One of the biggest problems that an athlete is faced with when travelling in Europe is definitely finding pool space to train in. Most pools, although they are very nice and clean do not offer lane hire for a small group of athletes and offer only public swim lanes. Not the greatest when you are trying pump out a threshold set and dodging Granny’s sidestroke legs or the Praying Mantis arms made famous by Mr Paul Rhodes.

We were lucky however that Tri Sud had hooked up with the local swimming club and we were able to swim in the squad after paying the season’s membership. There are a couple of pools that the club swims in, both about 10mins drive from where we live in town. The coach is a cool guy and although he doesn’t speak English, he made a big effort to let both Nicko and myself know what was going. Of course the bucket was there to translate for us which he did magnificently as always. Go Bucket!!

I was surprised to find however that the despite the club being given lane hire for the pool, that there were about 15 athletes and only 2 skinny little lanes. This was going to be good open water training. The lane ropes were the ones with the little plastic bubbles on the cord and other than separate us swimmers from Granny and her chopper legs, did little to swell the turbulence created by myself and the other 7 athletes in my lane.

Credit must go to the guys who are part of the swimming club for letting us come to train with them. It was definitely an experience and I know that if I was swimming back at home with that many people I would get shitty if three skinny foreigners came and took my lane space. I suppose that the fact that we are only skinny means that we don’t take up as much space in the lane. They also seem to be used to used to swimming with so many people which seems absolutely ridiculous when there are 5 or 6 public swimmers occupying the remainder of the lanes. It also seems ridiculous when at the minute that the clock ticks over to the hour, all swimmers have to get out of the pool. It doesn’t matter that there’s nobody to fill the lanes once we get out as the lifeguards all seem to be tools and lazy ones at that. For one session we had to start at 8am and had an hour to swim in one lane. There were 12 people swimming one lane!! And then when time was up we all had to get out. After getting out of the pool, I looked over to find that there was not a soul in the pool. No public swimmers at all. They had all gotten out and there looked to be nobody around to get in. Ridiculous and definitely an experience that makes me grateful for the pool availability we have back home. Suddenly, the old Hastings Pelican Park doesn’t seem so bad.