Chasing the sun in 2009…

Where to start? As you might know, we sold our house in December 2008 and started spending more time on the road.  As a quick overview of where we have been in 2009–here is the big travel blog post!

From my parents place in Stuttgart we drove to Frankfurt and flew from there to Bangkok to enjoy a Thai massage and some amazing Thai food before we hopped back on the plane<!–more–> to Auckland, New Zealand. We stayed there for three days and celebrated New Years with some friends before we headed down to Taupo where we based ourselves before my first Ironman race in March.  Just 3 days after the race we left lovely New Zealand to travel to San Francisco to stay with my buddy Paul from Webcor cycling team. I enjoyed a week off from training and we explored the city and the surroundings of the bay area–it is a really lovely and very beautiful place where I will definitely come back to visit.

We continued to travel east and I restarted training in Austin, Texas with my old UT buddy Brant, a former runner and now a cyclist.  I used that time to slowly get back into training and at the same time checked out the SXSW music festival- really crazy how packed the city gets with all kinds of future stars!

Two weeks later we were back in sunny Florida where I got my butt back in race shape for the next destination: St Croix, US Virgin Islands. Wow, that’s a nice tropical place with a beautiful downtown area and actually a great very challenging Ironman 70.3 race. Our home-stay with Pat &amp; Pat was just amazing–they are the parents of one of my UT swimming buddies, Scott. After the race, we went snorkeling and enjoyed “normal” life for a few days.

After that we were back to Florida for more training before the next race in Disney World- here I gotta mention my first 70.3 win, crossing the line wearing Mickey Mouse ears!

After completing those 3 races, I thought I deserved a break and we drove up to my In-laws in St. Augustine–the oldest town in America with nice Spanish influence. By that time it was end of May and I hopped back on the plane to come back to Luxembourg, the place I call home.

Soon enough we back on the road down to Le Barcares, in the South of France, right next to the Spanish boarder. A three week training camp got me in shape for the next camp Font Romeu in the French Pyrenees.  Another three weeks of hard training with a great group in altitude brought me into good race shape and we were off to Prague in Czech Republic to race the European Long Distance Champs.  Just a few days later we had a reason to celebrate my Vice European title with a week holidays in Barcelona.  It was very busy and very Spanish (I guess that means good red wine paired with great tapas and mucho fun).  A week of busy shopping and sightseeing might not have been the best off-time for me but it was absolutely worth it and then I was ready for the next big training block in Loulay, France. I spent just two weeks there with my buddies Paul &amp; Jimmy in order to work on my base training before driving back to Stuttgart, Germany for a repacking session and an early flight to Fuerteventura, Canary Islands in Spain.  This was my last and most important build up before the famous Hawaii Ironman.

After three weeks of endless training hours in sweltering heat we boarded several planes till we touched down in Las Vegas, Nevada in the USA to network at the Interbike. Man, looking back that was very useful but so freaking exhausting and stressful because the jet lag combined with all of the flying around didn’t make it easy.

Right after the race, we felt the need to be present in Luxembourg so after a 3 day spa trip to Phoenix we changed out flights and flew back home to Luxembourg for another two and a half weeks–it was really cold and we certainly were not used to that anymore!

On our way back to the US from Luxembourg we stopped in Clearwater to watch the 70.3 World Champs before we finally took off for our real holidays up in Telluride, Colorado to visit my sister.  A short trip from Telluride to Moab in Utah needs to be mentioned as well–there I discovered the most impressive landscape I have ever seen (which I guess says a lot–as I have seen a lot of landscape)!

Once our time was up there, we left the lovely and snowy mountains of Colorado to go back to St. Augustine for a couple of weeks with Alicia’s family before heading back to Frankfurt and then finally Luxembourg again….uff! What a trip!

So in short….

Luxembourg – Stuttgart – Frankfurt – Bangkok – Auckland – Taupo – Auckland – San Francisco – Austin – Tampa – St. Augustine- Orlando- Tampa – St Croix- Tampa – Frankfurt – Luxembourg – Le Barcares – Font Romeu – Prague – Barcelona – Loulay – Stuttgart – Frankfurt -Fuerteventura – Las Vegas – Kona – Phoenix – Frankfurt – Luxembourg – Pheonix – Clearwater – St Augustine – Jacksonville – Grand Junction – Ophir – Telluride – Moab –  Grand Junction – Jacksonville – St Augustine – Frankfurt – Luxembourg.

Thanks to everyone who made this year of traveling possible (and to all of the people who offered us a place to stay along the way)!  We are looking forward to 2010–bring it on!