In Munich, I waited for just over four hours before they found me a ride. It way cheaper to use Buchbinder rather than one of the big chain compaines so it was definitely worth the wait. That night I stayed with Lioinman, aka Hans Olsson, for the night in his pad in Innsbruck, skied at Stubai the next day, picked up Jon at the airport in Innsbruck and moved into an apartment in Solden.

Bode and Ted have been over here for the last week and change. Jimmy was here, but his ankle that he broke water skiing this summer wasn’t functioning properly so he flew home to get more surgery. Total bummer. Hopefully, he will still be able to savage a season, but it doesn’t look good for him right now. It's exceptionally painful news for me since I brokered his trade of snow skis for one of Jamie Beauchesne's, the current world record holder, slalom skis. I traded a pair too and his slalom ski is insane. Just ask my brother, he used it all summer. Anyway, the rest of the ski team arrived on Thursday and had their first day training GS at Stubai yesterday.

I was invited to work in with those guys, but instead I spent the last three days free skiing on the race hill at Solden. Luckily, the race hill has been open for skiing the last three days. They had a couple snow guns on it and haven’t groomed it for at least three days so it’s really grippy. My best chance to score points next Sunday at the World Cup Season Opener is in my eyes to spend as much time on that hill as possible. I forgot how damn steep it is, but it was really nice to work on my steeps skiing without gates. For the first two days, it felt a lot like my performance there last year – totally sucking. However, yesterday I really feel like I made some huge strides. I was skiing with my hip almost on the snow and trying to be super forward. It gave me a chance to slide a bit at the top of the turn before turning it into an arc. I’ve been decent at throwing my skis sideways with a stivit, but the other approach is much faster. So I’m pretty fired up about it. We took 6 runs on the race hill yesterday and I was going up for a 7^th when it was closed. I think free skiing on the race hill is over until it’s open for less than an hour next week before the race once it’s injected with water.

It was great to get so much time on it. Anyway, weather was coming in for the weekend so Jon and I got off the hill and ripped down to Monaco. The seven hour drive was a lot longer than I would have liked, but waking up in Monaco looking out at the ocean made it all worth it. What a pleasant change of scenery. I went for a run, did some core, and swam this morning. Now I think it’s nap time. It’s so nice to finally have a day off to catch up on things. Jon and Crill are here going nuts about the TV Show. Jon has a ton of voice over work to do and since it’s all in Swedish I can’t help, which makes this day amazing. Not to mention, Jon wants to do all of the producing himself so my job as director is obsolete making my day infinitely better.

We will either drive north tomorrow or Monday depending on the US Team’s training schedule and weather. I’ll ski with them for three days and then go from there. Planning too far ahead is for the birds.

Hope you’re all doing well, w