Estonia!

Today is our first day in Estonia! Two days ago, our final full day in Finland, I did a skate time trial with the Canadians. We raced in Lahti on the world cup trails, and had a two lap course with lots of hard uphills and fast, short downhills.  It was definitely a bit of a shock after some relatively easy days of training, I didn't feel very good, and went pretty slow, but my goal for the day was to get out and go hard, to start getting revved up for the races, and I was able to do that, so that was good!

Yesterday we drove from Vierumaki to Helsinki, then boarded a ferry for a couple hours, which took us to Tallin, Estonia and then drove a final three hours to our hotel near Elva. It was a long day of travel! The ferry ride was really fun, I'd never been on a ferry that much bigger than the ones on Lake Champlain that are pretty much a platform for the cars wit a small balcony up to. This ferry had 10 floors, restaurants, a dance hall, a duty-free store, bunk rooms, lots of places to sit, as well as a deck on top to go outside and watch!

Today we went to Otepaa, where the races are going to be, and also the site of the most recent world cup. We skied around on our courses, and even some of the world cup ones. We all had watched the world cup on TV, and witnessed nearly every racer herring-boning up what appeared to be a huge hill, so today, Ash, Kinsey and I  skied the men's course, and found the hill.....it was exponentially bigger in real life! I skied our skate, classic, and sprint courses, and they were all very fun! The skate race is all pretty gradual, but the classic has some big striding hills which should be awesome to race on!

I have lots of pictures, but the internet is really slow, so I'll try to put them up later.