The longest flight of my life
November 2007
Check out what I've been up to between races.
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 Hi Guys and Girls

 

I’m currently down under at the moment and things are really starting to warm up with the temperature averaging around the mid twenties and building.

 

About a week before we jumped on the plane to Australia I received a call from my team mentioning that maybe I should look around. Why? Was my immediate reaction, particularly since we’d already agreed the terms and conditions of my 08 contract. His immediate reply was “How do you want me to pay you?” in potatoes!” Obviously I wasn’t just shocked but a tad pissed off considering that by this late stage all of the other seats had been filled and I’d been sidelined, sin-binned, benched or what ever you want to call it. I have some other words I’d like to say but I decided to keep it clean!

So it was back to the drawing board and time to get on the blower and make some calls.

 

A few days later we had the bags packed we were on our way back to Australia. No one really likes sitting on a plane for so long particularly with a 21 month old that doesn’t walk anymore, he runs. Not only that he decided planes aren’t for sleeping, there for playing, so Isabelle and me decided if we’re going to survive this we should do it in shifts. She had him for 2-3 hours then vice versa. He was actually really well behaved no screaming or crying and complaining, just barely no sleep clocking up only about 5 hours in the 24 hour journey. I think for the way back I need to get some tranquillizers!

Normally when we arrive in Brisbane Mum & Dad are there to pick us up and we had directly down to the Gold Coast. This time round it was my brothers Birthday and he lives at the Sunshine Coast which is an hours drive north of Brisbane, so by the time we’d crawled in to bed up there it was about 2 am. The best part was Ryan was wide awake two hours later ready rearing to start the day!

My alarm went off at 7 am, so not a whole lot of sleep done, but stage one of Jamie’s Birthday festivities were calling which was a charity Golf tournament. We finished second which wasn’t bad but by 4 pm my batteries were getting low and we still had to go out for dinner. We survived dinner and we got the little fella to bed no worries, but this time he was up at 2.30 am and didn’t go back to bed until about 5 am. The third and final stage of my brother’s 40th was a deep sea fishing trip which meant getting up at 5.30 am, so not a whole lot of sleeping being done again. Our deep sea fishing dreams were completely shattered after about 6 hours of looking up and down in the middle of the ocean and the only thing I managed to do was empty the content of my stomach and fall asleep on the fly bridge.

 

The highlight of our trip was when we were on our way back to the port of Noosa when we came across two whales. I reckon it was a mother whale about 40 feet long and a baby one about half the size. So we rebranded our day out as a whale watching trip. So all was not lost. That afternoon we repacked our bags and headed down to the Gold coast which is about 2.5 hours drive south

Over the next 5 days it was all about catching up on sleep cause the following week-end Isabelle and me had a wedding to go to down in Sydney. We hung around down there for a few days and did the tourist thing like fish and chips on Bondi Beach some more at Manly and a ferry ride around the Harbour and of course some shopping! Ryan spent the week-end with my Mum and Dad which we were a bit nervous about because he hasn’t really seen them for about 9 months but he had a great time! I think it had something to do with mum’s home made animal cookies……

This week I’m full swing back into my fitness program and the boys are smashing me up out there, it’s not just the training it’s the 5 am starts as well and I feel like I’m 50 years old, what ever that feels like.

Anyway, other then that I’m just trying to finalize my employment for next season and I should be able to fill you in on all the details next month. In the mean time I’ll build a sand castle for  ya’s! C ya.

 

Karl

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