2014 Moving

​At the end of May, I drove from Saskatoon to St. Catharines, ON: with my mom as my co-pilot. It was a hard 3 days in a car but we made it in one piece. My mom told me I was a slave driver because I pushed the driving as late as we could every night. I drove most of the time, mom had to be the navigator and look up hotels and gyms we could stop at along the way. This was frustrating at times because we didn’t have cell service through multiple parts of our drive and the good old fashion road maps had to come out.  I wanted to make it to St. Catharines as fast as possible because I knew I did not have much time to train before heading to Europe for 2 competitions.
 
After only being in St. Catharines for 6 days trying to settle in, I boarded a plane to Germany.  I am slowly learning it is much different flying out of Saskatoon versos Toronto. In Saskatoon it is only a 15 minutes drive to the airport and I only need to be at the airport 45 minutes to1 hour early. This is not the case in Toronto; it is minimum 1.5-hour drive with no traffic (but I have learned the hard way, Toronto traffic can be horrible!), then need to park your car and take a shuttle to the terminal, and you must be at the airport 2 hours early for a flight. I am just lucky I have elite statute and can use fast track lanes and enter the lounge.  Also sometime being an elite member of Air Canada you get a complementary upgrade to first class; which is exactly what happened to me on the way to Europe.  My 9-hour flight I got to sit in the pods, which if you don’t know what that means they lay flat so you can get a pretty good sleep on a plane. No complaints from me. 
 
I am excited to say I won the Germany grand prix and now am a 2-time winner of this tournament. It was a great event with about 16 girls in my weight class.  This tournament is an all girls event that is always large with a lot of great wrestling. I am excited to be apart of it. After the tournament we had a camp in Germany. It was a great facility and multiple countries stayed to train. On our day off we went to Koln, so we got to site see a little. It was a short camp because we had to get back on the bus to drive to Austria for another tournament.  
 
Austria was a small tournament but they set it up a bit differently so I ended up wrestling 6 matches, which is great to get more experience. I wrestled well and ended up winning this event as well.  I went to Austria 6 years ago and it was just as beautiful as I remember it being.  We were in the town of Gotzis, which is surrounded by mountains and forest. We got lay back and relax by my favorite pool in the world. Over all this 10 day trip was filled with great wrestling and great sites and great people but I was ready to come back to Canada and settle into my new home.
 
I am enjoying St. Catharines weather. I have been biking most places on the non-rainy days. I am trying to live the full time athlete life. My next event is Canada Cup July 5th and then I am coming back to Saskatoon from July 10-13 for my best friends wedding. I can’t stay long because I need to prep for Common Wealth games in Scotland on July 30th. 

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