New York!

Slight delays, slight sickness, 26 hour travelling, and I'm in Ny!

Here's a little update about the ski trip from last week. With my travel time finishing faster than an adequate analogy, I'm getting more and more nostalgic and look back on the fun things that have happened.

When we were in Austria skiing, my brothers and I decided to do some hors-piste and started trekking past the ski lifts, up to the peak of one of the mountains in the area. The long and treacherous (until we found the shortcut) and the view up top was fantastic. Bascially, we'd walk up from the top of the chairlift until we got to the peak of the mountain, at which point we'd break out a celebratory beer or coke, some chocolate and then continue skiing down.

The best part was one of the overhangs of snow that we found at the top. Victor, being the loving brother he is, saw this long drop from one of the icy edges of the peaks and convinced my little bro (thomas) that he should jump it. All the while, Vic knew very well that he wouldn't dare do the jump himself, but what better way to see something funny than to convince younger sibl;ings to risk their lives.

After much ridiculing, Thomas was convinced to go and took off down the mountain, landing the 12ft jump on his pack in a big 'poof' of snow and skiis. It was hilarious. After we saw that the jump was safe and broken bones were minimal, we all took turns jumping off and climbing back to the top, slowly carving out the side of the mountain.

My high point came when I attempted to stun onlookers with a 360 only to have my ski clip the edge of the mountain face as I took off. Completely thrown out of sync, I ended up falling on my head with a girlish scream, before walking back up and trying again

Time to visit this huge city

Airport Hopping

Heyyy....5 hours later

Checking my emails with a few hours to kill at Heathrow. Weird thing is being at the exact same computer that I used for my first Australia race update months ago (which, for the record, I owned). Jeez, I'm already getting nostalgic

Next update will be from America! Time to change the blog name again

This is the End?

Siitting in the Geneva airport with about an houur to go before ii start my trip back to ameriica. I hate these internet machne keyboards. My 'rents just dropped me off after a week annd a halff of crazy skiing that all but demolished my out of shape body. I tried to keep up wiht my brothers like i used to back in the day and ended up with crippliing muscle spasms. ouch. But great weather and great company made it all worth it. Let me tell you, goingg ffrom 30° surfiing to -10° skiiing in two days reallly messes with you

But yes, on my way back over the atlantic finally. It seems liike forever ago that i put on my travel hat, grabbed my transformer lunchbox and left for the sunny european continient. Now iits the other side of the pond that seems unknown to me.

Withh about 2 weeks to go before im back home, its time to think about that scary 'real liffe' i keep hearing about. And jobs? whats that? I dont know but its got to happen.

It'll be cool Im sure. 20 hrs from New York. See ya Europe Trip

One Long Drive

Back in the homeland. I got to Warsaw and felt really good to be 'home'. It was a temporary one a few months ago but now I feel like I can walk around the city and be a local...an accent-speaking one. I slept one night with my cuz and one night on the floor of Gabi/Radek's place where their lovely dog fell asleep on my legs and kept me warm. Here's the Palace of Culture from Warsaw

Tomorrow morning we're going to drive down to Vienna and I'm going to meet up with my family for the first time in 9 months! I'm pretty stoked and it looks to be a great skiing time. After all of the surfing that's gone on I might try to switch to snowboarding while I'm there

I was checking out google maps and doing measurments. With Paul and I having done 8000km in the van across Australia, that's the equivalent of having driven from Sydney to Bangkok, or from Montreal to Poland. Pro-star driver right here

I Hate Banks, I Love Travel

My body has no idea what time it is this side of the world

Here's a little sidestory. I had an 8 hour layover in London, on my way to Poland. When I'd arrived in London Heathrow after 32 hours of travel, 3 flights and 4 different countries I decided what better way to spend my 8 hour connection than by visiting a bank! As some of you may know, i'd been in a wrestling match with my UK bank since December about funds that had 'gone missing'. I'd tried to transfer money to Canada only to have it dissapear somewhere enroute. These hassles continued over 2 months as I called and called and got no help and finally decided that it'd be easier to just rob the bank.

With that in mind I decided to take a trip into town from the airport and face-off with the bank officials in person. Here's a picture of me looking overly-optimisitic as I wait for someone to help me. Little did I know that I'd be in for a three hour fiasco of stress and confusion. Little did they know that I hadn't showered for over two days and was still wearing the same underwear and socks as I had been over 20,000km ago. I'm sure they did notice that with little or no sleep under my belt from two days of travel I was pretty irritable, making no sense while talking and having trouble not drooling on myself.

It was funny, in a way (a small way). I just came into the bank, and told them to cancel everything and give me my money. How hard could that be? Very. Calls were made, files were drawn up, accounts were given and at one point I was even told to go to Weymouth and get it. Excuse me? Do we live in the middle ages? Can you not transfer these funds somehow or do I need to take my mule down to Dorset and bring my gold bullion back in large brown potato sacks?

The best part for me was scanning through my file history with the bank and seeing notes that had been made on it over the past few weeks. Example:

Feb 16 - Please phone client ASAP, urgent request for explanation
Feb 18 - CLient phoned again, demanding payments and unsure of situation
Feb 20 - Client irritable and demanding phone call before his cell phone is turned off
Feb 21 - Client extremely vulgar and personally offensive, making remarks about my weight and status of my marriage. Please advise

Maybe not the last one, but at some point I think that people just stopped caring that I was calling every day. Here's once such person on the phone, enduring my fury and my camera

Happy ending though, I stayed much longer than I wanted to, excalated the situation to some higher ups and got my money in hand with 4 hours to go before my poland flight. Then, with a large lump of cash in my backpack along with all of my personal belongings, I ran back to the tube, took a train to Heathrow, found a bus to Luton, sat through incredible traffic jams and made my flight with 45 minutes to spare! Here's a photo of me on the subway back to the airport, stressed about time

Australia to Austria. In Transit until Tuesday!

So it's the end of an era.  I'm at the airport, checked in, waiting to sample some Emirate Airlines luxury (followed by Wizzair dankness) and I'm leaving this land of sun and surf in 2 hours.  Sad times, just me my tan and my cowboy hat now...

The last day was great though.  I had a large breakfast with friends down on Bondi's main street where we discussed travelling and ski weather in Austria.  Then my Bondi buddies Lucas, Nate, Paul and I all went to surf during my 'last hours' on Tamarama beach.  For them, it was a quiet day, for me, it was like a graduation into the world of big surf.   First of all, the rip at Tam was really strong, pulling you right across the water.  Second of all, the waves were ginormous compared to any I've toucehd before.  Finally, we had to enter the water by treading over some cliffs into deeper water, waiting for a gap in the waves while on the rocks, then jumping in with our boards and frantically paddling before the next wave came to bash us facewise back into the rocks. When Nate explained these steps to me as we snaked
over the rocks, I barely had time to say 'are you ing serious?' before he'd hopped in and I followed.

It was a fantastic way to finish the Australia trip, some good friends, good surf, and the sun peeking out of the clouds.

Check out this travel lineup:  Flight to Bangkok, then to Dubai, then to London, then to Warsaw, then train to Katowice, then car to Austria.  Hooray for jetlag!

Saying Bye to the Board

Final Km Count: 7964.5km

That is a fantastic amount of driving, if I don't say so myself. I know what you're all thinking, I should have driven in circles on my last day to break 8g's. True, I should have. But I was so worried about messing up the van on the last day. Why? Because last day's seem to be the days when things go wrong! Here's an example.

Paul and I had spent many days in the van making sure that we didn't lock our one set of keys inside. I won't bore you with the logistics of the locks, such as teh fact that the driver's side lock had to be opened from the inside and that the side door was locked manually. Needless to say, it was always a bit of a worry in the back of my mind that the keys would be left in the locked van after the hassles of locking all the doors. So what happens when I spend my last night in the van across from Bondi beach? Door slams and Dzido is caught outside of the at midnight with nothing on but shorts and a toothbrush in hand. I'd locked myself out on my way to the public bathroom. Only on the last day does this stuff happen! After lots of time spent debating about paying for someone to come open the door I decided to try to go ninja on the car. I shimmied open the tiny top window with my palm and was one mesh screen from getting back into my house. After a little bit of punching and ripping and to the astonishment of onlookers, I hoisted myself up into the tiny porthole as cars whizzed by and slipped in. Brilliant

Van: Returned

Surfboard: Sold

Tan: Crisp but fading

Left the van at the car depot yesterday and spent this morning selling my board. It's been emotional and as much as I can't wait to find some powder (or rain?) in Austria, it's sad to think of not living Down Under. Who knows when the next time I get to surf will be! Time for the next adventure though. Let me just say, everyone of you has got to live in a van even for jsut a little. It's quite something else, and as my friend Nate put at the start of my Aussie trip here: "..those guys sleeping in vans are the happiest people in the street." It makes sense to me now.