Kirchburg – Working for the first time in four months.

Well, my worries about the stopover at the Madrid airport were partly founded, as mine and Nic’s planes were both delayed about an hour. Nowhere near as bad as the eleven hours when I was trying to get to Paris, but irritating none the less, as Paula had come down from Berlin to see me for the day in Stuttgart and I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. I didn’t get in till after midnight, but every moment with her was fantastic. Unfortunately after 15 hours, I had to be on my way to Salzburg where Shevy was to pick me up from the train station and take me back to Kirchburg, where I would be working for the next 3 weeks.

My job with Alpen-rider is as a driver. I am writing this blog entry while sitting in my work van in a no parking area at the Munich airport. I’m an hour early for a flight from London that 4 customers are on, so I need to wait for them to take them the 2 hours back to Kirchburg. It’s not terribly interesting work, but I do get at least 3 days at Oktoberfest, and all accommodation, most food and all beer for free while I am at the chalet.

I got in quite late at night on Tuesday and didn’t really do anything except eat, have a few drinks with the other staff, all of which except for Shevy’s Austrian wife Bianca, and the token Canadian, Hannah, are Australian. The next morning the whole staff went out for canyoning. I hadn’t done it before as I knew I’d be doing it for free here, but after doing it, I wish I’d done it both times. It’s an absolute blast, abseiling down waterfalls, jumping into pools through waterfalls, sliding down waterfalls. Yeah, lots of stuff with waterfalls.

After canyoning it was my first opportunity to take the work van out and experience driving on the other side of the road. I may have hit a few kerbs, as the roads and thinner and the van wider than what I am used to. The weirdest thing is that I put the clutch down with the same foot, but I have to change gears with my opposite hand. I’m sure it wont take me too long to get used to it, however.

We had a big bbq that night as all the guests would be arriving the next day. It was good to just hang out with the staff and get to know new friends. After a fairly big night on the Jagies and various other weird shit, we all turned in, knowing it would be a busy day the next day.