Sunday was a full rest day here in Borovets for the NZ and Aussie teams, with a rally just down the road to keep the boys occupied for the morning and also keeping us here with the road into the hotel being closed. The girls went for a walk into Borovets town to have a look around, and Sophie, Kayla and I had a gentle jog back while Becky and Alice caught up with their parents who have also just arrived! After lunch most of the team got in the pool and relaxed for the afternoon, before the NZ team gained an extra (Latvian) member in a nice NZ shirt for dinner…

Nick and Tim then made the mistake of leaving their room key on the dinner table, and of course us girls decided they needed to be messed with. While the boys had their meeting to decide their start blocks for the upcoming races, we grabbed some toilet paper and headed upstairs. Becky and I left Alice, Kayla and Sonia to toilet paper Nick and Tim’s room, while we climbed over the partition in the balcony that they shared with Cam and Ed to get into their room as well. Alice made a pretty poor effort by just wrapping their computer mouse in toilet paper before running out, but Becky had the great idea to separate Ed and Cam’s beds so one was two bases and the other was two mattresses (well, we thought it was great). Sadly, there are no photos of this since we were interrupted halfway through by all the boys bursting into the room, but we’ll make sure there’s a round two… Actually, round two happened later that night when we went to go and remake their beds and short sheeted them. We found out this morning that Cam didn’t even notice, so we might need to up our pranking game.

This morning we woke up to the news that the whole town has no water, which apparently is going to be fixed but for now is very inconvenient – especially as it’s blue sky and feels about 28 degrees. Good thing most of us are on bottled water anyway.

Sunday is the day most of the other teams from around the world arrive here, and so now it all feels a bit more real with the hotel filling up with people of all different nationalities – all of them competing for a prize at JWOC… no pressure. All of us are really looking forward to starting with the sprint tomorrow having done the model for the sprint and long today, and I for one feel like I’m as prepared as I could be in my first big overseas competition!

Helena