Back Home from Croatia

Well I have a lot of catching up to do. We just got home to Munich yesterday from the pre-European Championships in Croatia and then the German Open in Greifenburg, Austria. I have tons of pictures to post, but you all will get tired of them, so I just started with a few from Croatia. After leaving Austria waaaaaay too late, Corinna and I drove through Italy and Slovenia and into the little town of Buzet, Croatia. Buzet is about 45 minutes from the Adriatic and it is just beautiful. We ended up staying at a guest house in the little town of Hum (sounds like Hume). They called it a town, but really it was just a church, restaurant, cemetary and our house. But, what an amazing house. One of the pictures is the view from our terrace. For 11 Euro each per night we got to stay in a house on top of hill overlooking a gorgeous valley. The house was built in the 1200's the owner told us and it had walls that were about a meter thick! That was good for keeping it somewhat cool - it was in the low 90s most days and of course, no one has air conditioning :-) The area where the competition was held was lovely and quite rural. The "big" town of Buzet had just one grocery store, an ice cream shop, a couple of hotels and a bunch of beauty shops (only one of which offered pedicures....and then, only on Mondays - of course, I showed up for one on Tuesday and missed out :-( Anyway, I got to spend the week driving around the countryside seeing it up close while everyone else was out flying. Luckily, driving for the Austrian team is pretty easy as they all made goal every day except the first (but no one made goal that day). So, I only had to pick them up once. Every other day I could just go sight seeing where ever I liked and then show up at goal around 4 or so and wait for them all to come in. That's just the way I like it and I had a wonderful time. The competition was even exciting as the top three positions or so were up for grabs right up until the last day. Happily, Gerolf won in the end and I gathered up all of the girls to do "the wave" for him at the goal field. Someone was taking video of it, which I would love to see....I'm sure we looked ridiculous. The dorky picture of Kevin holding the sun shade was our attempt to get some data coverage for my Crackberry. I was going crazy with no internet connection anywhere and the Crackberry wouldn't even give me my emails. So uncivilized!!! So anyway, Kevin insisted we could boost the signal with the right equipment. Needless to say, the sun shade from the car was probably not the "right" equipment. We never got it to do anything and we just looked like complete idiots moving all around the hill pointing that sun shade in every direction.