Combo-trip of Ardennes training and Int'l Animal Rights Conf.

pre-talk meal

Last week I was back on the road again - but this time for "pure pleasure", yeah a bit of work done but had a BLAST!

Since we had to be in Luxembourg for my talk at International Animal Rights Conference we combined it with a couple of hilly training days in the Ardennes.

We went to La Roche en Ardenne so we'd have a cute town to walk through in the evenings.  Our apartment was just a few meters from town.  Everything in our housing arrangement was great except for two things. The first was that it was spider-central.  Every few minutes i would encounter one of these creatures from the flying variety to the big thick hairy ones.  The first night i had spider nightmares - no sleeping to be had.  It could have also been partly due to the bed, which was the second thing wrong with the apartment.  The bed was more like a U-shape, where the sag in the middle was big enough to get lost in, or to be a great hiding place for yet more spiders. 

La Roche en Ardenne Castle

Thankfully Jonas came up with a way to minimize the sag by placing the spare blankets on top of the metal sagging beam. It wasnt perfect but at least we didnt have to struggle the whole night to crawl out of the hole.

As for the training, it felt fun to be in the hills again where i could interval myself into the ground.

International Animal Rights Conference was a unique experience.  Instead of giving a talk to random folks who were maybe vegetarian, i was speaking to a room full of animal rights activists (obviously all vegan) with maybe the odd vegetarian here and there. 

It was great to hear that my talk was appreciated and valued.  Based on the questions and comments i heard later, it seems that some of them even memorized my key points!  Again, i totally forgot to record my talk to share with those who couldn't make it there. But i was interviewed by a cool Luxembourg radio station shortly afterwards.  I will post the link here shortly!