Mise-en-scène

The year is 2010 and the summer orienteering schedule is perfect. Too perfect in fact. North America has the best summer line-up of orienteering events in, well, probably ever. Out on the West Coast a massive North American Orienteering Festival which involves 21 events from the 26th June 26 to the 21st July, including the US champs, the North American Champs, Barebones in Whistle, and the Rocky Mountain Orienteering Festival. In August the Ottawa Orienteering Club is playing host to the Canadian Orienteering Championships. Meanwhile, in Europe, the stars have aligned themselves to provide the perfect travelling opportunity. The Junior World Orienteering Championships (aka JWOC) occurs in Aalborg, Denmark, from the 4th to the 10th of July. 2 weeks later the World University Orienteering Championships (WUOC) are being held in Borlange, Sweden, and the very next week and a mere 2 hour train ride away o-ringen (for those of you who think you're seeing a pattern, this event is never, in fact, shortened to OROC) is occurring in the town of Orebro. The result of this schedule is 4 weeks of orienteering in a five week period starting on the 28th of June and ending on the 30th of July.

I had a decision to make. Do I stay in North America and travel to the West Coast for some great domestic and near-domestic orienteering? Or do I travel to Europe for some equally good orienteering... in Europe? The decision is as easy as it looks. While travelling to Europe is slightly more expensive than travelling across our vast country, the difference isn't great enough to be the deciding factor. What tipped the scale is the combination of the awesome orienteering, the chance to travel with friends and see relatives, the opportunity to scope out universities for masters programs, and well... it's Europe. Enough said. Alright the scoping out universities probably won't happen much; but it makes for a good secondary justification for a trip to Europe.

With that decision made it came time to sweat the small stuff. And by small stuff I mean everything smaller than the decision to go to Europe itself.

First up: registering for the orienteering events and booking my flights. JWOC was easy. I'm going to JWOC as a team leader since last year was the last year I was able to qualify as an international junior - yup I'm now old stuff. Luckily for me, Randy Kemp, also from Ottawa, is also going as a team leader, and thanks to the fact that he's even older stuff, is taking care of pretty much all of the organizational aspect of our trip to JWOC. So I told Randy I was planning on going, paid more money than I care to think about, and all is set. Oh and as Randy isn't going to the training camp I'm getting about four days of free accommodations. WUOC involved filling out a few forms and sending some cheques to various people but was quite straight forward. O-ringen cause me some trouble though. The first time I tried registering my credit card wouldn't go through. And the second time was actually on the evening of the regular registration deadline and thus past it in Sweden. I was also down at the West Point Military Academy in the New York for an orienteering meet and couldn't remember my password to log in to register. I had to climb a big hill just to get enough cell phone reception to call home to get someone to find my password and register for me. Luckily for me it worked. Booking the flights was the usual messy affair of trying to find the cheapest options out there. I made the mistake of allowing plus-minus one day on both the out and return flights and accidentally chose the cheapest options - ie one that had me catching a flight home on the morning of Friday July 30 instead of the 31st as I initially wanted. The issue with that is that the last race of o-ringen is on Friday so I may have to miss it. And that's just not cool. The flight out was a red-eye flight that left on Monday, June 21st at 10:45 and got into Heathrow at 10:30 AM the next morning.

This is getting long now so tune in soon for more details and an update from the road.

Cheers,

Jeff