It has been a struggle to find the Internet since we have arrived, even McDonald's is failing us, it just won't let us connect The last few days have certainly been interesting. It all started with arriving at Melbourne airport after running from the long term car park to be there at the start of check in to find out from matt and stew that Thai didn't know about a boats... This resulted in a worried hour or two while our travel agent and Thai sorted it all out, thankfully the manager at Thai was super nice and flight centre realized they stuffed up and paid our excess baggage charge, it makes me wish I had left in the stuff i had thrown out to minimize weight.  Once this was all sorted we settled into the 26 hours of airports and planes we had in front of us. Traveling with team mates is certainly better than going it alone, although I did loose count of the number of times we were asked "are you guys going to the Olympics?"  We arrived in zurich airport early Saturday morning grabbed our bags and boats I picked up the car while matt and stew were inconspicuous with our boats... Once the lease car lady had departed we inflated our roofs racks loaded the boats and hit the road for our journey to our accommodation in centron which is about 5 Km's downstream from the race finish, where we are staying with the rest of the Australian team. Today we have been out amongst it on the river. We jumped on at the slalom course at bourge and paddled down from there. I scooted off on my own to try to get my whitewater feel back, I certainly felt rusty in the beginning but by time I had reached the race start I had started to feel like I could paddle. We are lucky ( some may say unlucky) to have Ben O one of the british guys staying with us so he showed us down the river, half the group jumped out at the end of the easy section, but Ben, Rob and I went on from there, down to Centron. There is a stunning gorge section through very tight cliff walls, I regretted not having the go pro when we got there, as we exited the gorge we were greeted by 1500m of meaty grade 4 with some big holes and wave trains. Thankfully by this time I had started to feel much better on whitewater. An added bonus of this paddle was being able to walk up the hill to our house. First impression of the race course is that it is pretty busy in places with some big pushy waves but I think I should be able to get it sorted quickly enough, then it will just be about trying to get neater and cleaner. It is now Monday,  have grabbed my new boat from the americans, it looks good, however I think it is over weight again and the seat is rather high...  After overnight rain the river has risen about 22m3/sec so we had a bit of a look and decided the river was a little high for us at this stage so we got out on the lake for some intervals, I felt i was moving ok this morning, which I always nice for confidence levels. The sun is out now so enjoying summer and looking forward to jumping on the river this afternoon.