I left home at 7 am CET to go to the airport, with the idea it wouldn’t be all that long before I’d set foot to ground in Florida. NOT. The check-in took quite a while and I was pretty lucky to be there two hours in advance because the line was pretty damn long. We were on the same flight as our national basketball team that was heading for a training session in Dallas… and our national mountainbiking team was on the same flight as well. After boarding, the plane finally took off at 11 AM.

The flight headed for Atlanta - I needed to be in Orlando, so I had to swap planes after the obligatory customs check. It was a nine hour flight, with 2-3 hours transit in Atlanta. The plane in Atlanta got stuck in some sort of traffic jam on the tarmac and when it was finally our time to take off, as we turned at the end of the runway you could see a line of 23 planes all waiting to take off. Weird, it was like all the planes of Atlanta needed to take off on the same strip.

Then it was an hour and a little bit to Orlando and then half an hour with a van to the congress center to get our badges and register. It was 4 am CET when I stepped inside the hotel room. I went out for a pizza with my manager [i share a room with him] and then I planned to take a shower, but apparently I fell asleep on the bed whien I was ‘just chilling for a second’. Damn.

I got up this morning at 6 am local time, because the event starts at 8, but doors open at 7. Gotta grab some breakfast first and then get on the tour bus to go to the main arena. The weather is weird. It’s very very warm, but it’s tropically humid too. We had a tropical storm yesterday, and you’d think the rain would cool down things… but it doesn’t.