Holiday part 1 - Winterberg with Emma

So although it has been a full 4 weeks since my holiday, I'm still phaffing around getting the photos sorted and on Whereismal.  But here goes with pitstop number 1 on our holiday.  After surprising Emma with her birthday present when she first arrived here over 6 weeks ago, we loaded the car with biking gear and headed off early the next morning to Winterberg - my paradise.



You've already seen two of my highlights of our 2 day stay in Winterberg.  Emma also rode brilliantly considering she's never ridden anything more extreme than a cruise along the seafront in Sunderland.  I shot a lot of sequence stills and the best way to view them is with the short video clip below:



Emma did crash 5 times during the 2 days but every crash was followed by laughter and not tears.  Tackling the berms below on the 6X track with good body position and just a dash of covering the front brake.  She must've had a good teacher ;-)



There was one steep section that Emma was not best pleased with and took a fair bit of encouragement to get down.  But as you can see from the following photos she was nailing that smiling by the end of our stay.







My personal highlight was dropping the big funbox in the park.  You've seen the sequence shot before, but below is a second image of me flying like a birdie.



Those with sharper eyes amongst you may notice I'm not perfectly straight which can be seen in the landing photo below:



That put the willies up me so I didn't do that again!  If you zoom in on the above photo you can see my front tyre nearly folding off the rim.  Check it out below:



I think I was going too slow as I didn't even take a warm up run and stop on the top to assess the speed.  I just went straight for it - an awesome buzz but I think I'll do what I did the previous day and checkout my line first.  In fact one of my favourite pictures is of me doing just that below:



A couple of my other favourites are below.  Park rats shredding the dirt jumps, a mid flight abort and my personal favourite of Emma pushing her bike uphill showing her commitment for another go at the whoops.  Shame Emma doesn't like the photo though as she says my old biking shorts don't do her any favours!  But I think it shows a better story than some of my action shots









Plenty more can be seen on my Flickr account here or by slideshow here.  Oh and soon as I hit the magic send button, I'm hitting the sack cos I'm up early and back to Winterberg tomorrow for what may be my last trip this season.  The weathers looking perfect, the bike is running sweet with my new wheelset and I've been reading a great tips book and watching a DVD I got for my birthday.  It's going to be awesome...