Medals, especially olympic ones, always impress me

When training in Italy we arrived to our destination Sunday night, with no food in the fridge of the apartment and with everyone really hungry since the airline food has never been much to celebrate and even less so nowadays. In the end we had some great pizza in a small cozy restaurant in the village we stayed in, Gressoney St. Jean.

On the wall they had a picture of a very sporty looking lady with a man hanging on to her. A more thorough investigation revealed that there were also some medals on the wall. One of them happened the be an olympic one, from Torino. Wow! Who had earned these?

My other big goal in life, in addition to climbing Everest, has been to get one of these. I tried sailing and that's probably where I would still have the best chance, if match-racing returns as a womens class into the olympics.

I went to the kitchen to ask. She was Arianna Follis! It was so nice to meet her. I googled her later. What an impressive cross-country skiing career! I envy her a lot, especially her medals, eminently the olympic one.

Impressed and jealous…

The name of the restaurant was gold, silver & bronze (in Italian something like Oro, Argento e Bronzo) and the whole village of Gressoney St. Jean was practically covered with pictures of Arianna Follis, we just hadn't seen them in the dark evening the first night we were there.

The kids loved the pizzas so much that we visited the place a second time at the end of the week. It is warmly recommended by us, the pizzas are really great!

Arianna also sent a lot of greetings to Virpi Kuitunen whom we now know as Sarasvuo, I'll try to forward them as well as I can.