OST BLOG: Carly Jordan, Devil's Glen, first year member of the OST
What a busy summer! After school ended late in June, I spent the month of July taking an online course for grade 11. The course I took was American history, and to my surprise I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot, and being able to keep flexible about when to study was much easier and enjoyable for me than sitting in a classroom. Every morning I would get up around 7 to go to the gym, and once I was back home I would work online on my course for about 5 hours. By the end of July I didn’t want any where near another computer! I also babysat quite a lot to make some extra money, and hung out with my friends.
Now I am in beautiful New Zealand! The experience has been amazing so far, and I can’t believe how lucky I am to be training here for a whole month. I'm also really enjoying the new team. For the first week of the camp I was pretty run down because of the 16 hour time change but after I adapted to it I was really excited to start training. The team and I were in gates by the third day on snow and were skiing from around 7am to 11. Now we have been training for two and a half weeks and I'm having a lot of fun.
On our first day off, about a week into the camp, the team and I went surfing down near Christchurch in the ocean. We all got lessons from the guy who runs the surf shop and most of us picked up on the surfing really quickly! It was so much fun and being down near the water and the view we had behind us of the mountains was incredible.
As for the earthquake NZ experienced yesterday, wow what a scary way to wake up at 4:30am! Luckily, Christchurch saw the worst of it, and we staying in Methven only experienced some glasses falling over in the kitchen. It was crazy watching the news after it happened to see that it was a 7.4 on the Richter scale! Though the morning was off to a rough start, we still managed to get up the mountain to have 5 hours of great training. What a crazy day!
Anyway, I'm having a great time so far, and I am looking forward to the upcoming races!