TVFreestylers Eurotour 2008

So I'm not gonna bore you with all the details but Euro tour with the Thames Valley boys was pretty amazing this year... Dougie and Anne turned up early afternoon (after getting a bit lost!) to pick me up and head to Dover for the ferry and the long drive to Plattling... Fortunately following last years escapades Dougie had brought his portable DVD player so he could continue the porn bus tradition haha.



Plattling was awesome as ever, warm water, good weather and good company (after managing to meet up with Max shortly after arriving) and that night (still without sleep) we headed out to check out the "Bavarian Culturefest" as Max called it...
After 4 or 5 days play at Plattling (during which time Fraggle managed to split his head open and had to go to hospital to get stitches) it was time to move on to sunny Austria, which wasn't looking terribly sunny at the time...

Austria was in huge water at the time which was awesome, the section of the Inn at Tosens was massive and continuous, but of little consequence, bit of a roller coaster ride and would have been fairly unpleasant in the event of a swim but we managed it without incident, though I was a bit confused as to the location of the old Reid wave when we reached the takeout, though was later told by Andy Turton that they have in fact dumped lots of rock into the river where it used to be, destroying what was once a finicky but potentially great decent sized wave...
So we ran the Immst to Haiming section of the Inn the next day and possibly something else that I cant remember before going out in Landeck on Friday night, finding a small nightclub and then owning the dance floor in true pissed up Brits-abroad fashion...
The next day while everyone was trying to recover, word reached us through Andy that the Silz Wave at Crazy Eddy's was running, and running good by all accounts, so me and Dougie jumped in the motor and hotfooted it over there, still both hanging from the night before to find that there was indeed a wave worth paddling! The other guys turned up shortly after and most of us had a go on the wave. Despite having to dislodge the odd surfer and sometimes missing it as it periodically greened out, it was well worth it... Then there was the night at Crazy Eddys, I cant really remember a lot of it but there was deffinately a live band, lots of people and huge amounts of Jaegermeister with Schorschi Schauff...

Next stop on the tour was Switzerland, although we gave up on Bremgarten this year we still stopped by to see our old friend Mr Weir and run some rivers! We started with James creeking home run the Glenner which turned out to be a really beautiful creek with some nice rapids, that opens with a 3 metre weir! Well with that out of the way the rest of the river was fairly easy, with one slot rapid with a bit of towback... It wasn't until after those of us who decided to run it had done it that James went on to tell us he had watched a 16ft open boat cartwheeled in there for a very long time! Thanks for the warning mate!

So after a couple more days and rivers we left Switzerland to head to the mighty Hawaii-Sur-Rhone wave in Lyon, I was full of anticipation by this time as it was the part of the trip I was looking forward to most, it would be my third trip there and I felt I could get a lot more out of it this time if the levels were right....