Ukkohalla calling… Monday 27 July
Fresh from the Nationals with a great medal haul for the girls, the BG cable team members met at Heathrow to begin their journey to the European Cable Wakeboard Championships in Finland. The usual chaos ensued with overweight board bags and repeating to every other inquirer over our tracksuits, “It’s like snowboarding on water”. Then a few more questions on the plane as the pilot announced us and wished us well. That was pretty cool!
The girls on the team were: Chloe Goudie in the Girls Division ; Sophie Cordery, Ellie Taylor, Tor Young for Junior Ladies; Steph Caller, Kirsteen Mitchell in Open Ladies and finally Sarah Kingdom, Alexandria Gardiner in the Masters Women Division, which would be running for the first time in this years Europeans.
The journey to Ukkoholla was long! Two planes (thanks to a final call as most of us were waiting at the wrong gate!!) and a coach trip to what must be the northern most cable in the world. Once at Helsinki we could really appreciate how far north we were heading, as the in flight map showed that planes just didn’t go any further!!! Just shy of Lapland, this had the potential to be very cold, but also very light with little if no night time!
Our plane from Helsinki arrived in Oulu at 8pm and for the 2 hour coach trip through beautiful forest and quaint Scandinavian farmlands, the sun didn’t set any more!! There was some confusion from the riders as to whether we were near ‘Daneland’, and unconfirmed sightings of bears! It was all a bit odd with a very eerie twilight and still dusk when we arrived at the Ukkohalla cable park late in the evening.
The tired eyes were greeted with a stunning glass lake, high cable and fun looking obstacles. We were all very excited and getting twitchy to go and session the cable. Then to make things even better, we got to our chalet!!!!!!! A five star cabin with six bedrooms, three bathrooms, sauna, drying room and view over the lake!!! This was arriving in style! We made everyone aware that this was GB HQ and got the flags flying ready for riding in the morning.
Tuesday 28 July 2009 | Permalink
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