Touring with COI, gearing up for busy schedule

May 24, 2007

Rena and I are about mid-way through our tour with Champions On Ice. We are in Denver this evening and after a 6 a.m. wakeup call tomorrow morning we fly to Albuquerque. We get to our hotel and then head to the arena. Then it’s on to the Pond at Anaheim and Staples in LA. That’s just blocks from where we live!

Things are going great. We’re enjoying the Tour. We skate to “Come What May” by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman from the movie “Moulin Rouge.” It sounds like a love song. We are emotionally tied to this song, and it’s a different side of skating for us. Oksana Grishuk choreographed the program for us. Being a great ice dancer, she brought a different look we haven’t had before.

The Tour ends June 3 in Portland, Oregon and, if everything works out, we will go to Bend, Oregon to pick up our new RV. It’s getting a third axle to help make it more stable and is four feet longer. I’m still looking forward to the day we can take our time and drive down the Pacific Coast Highway and explore from the northwest to southern California.

One of the best places we’ve been is to San Francisco. We stayed in the middle of town and San Francisco is a city that’s open 24 hours so there’s always something to do. I’ve been there about 15 times and never went to Alcatraz until this year. A bunch of us went together and it was fun.

We’re trying to work out some breaks in our schedule to do some things. We go to Japan after this Tour, come back and go to Italy and then after a short time back go back to Japan. I love Japan and it’s the next best place I would rather live than in California. This is Rena’s domain, and when we go there I follow her lead.

We spend a lot of time at the arenas. We get there hours before the show begins and are there late. There’s always people waiting for autographs and it takes a little while to get to the bus. Rena and I skate the opening and closing numbers and then we’re about fourth in the program. That gives us a lot of time between skating. I spend the time to catch up on e-mails, phone calls and do a lot of stretching to stay loose for when we skate.

We analyze every program we do, even on Tour. It’s a little difficult on Tour because we have to adapt to the dark spots and skating in the spotlight. We practice the program so much we can just about do it in the dark. Sometimes one of us won’t be where we’re supposed to be, and we’ll be looking around for each other. We’ve skated so much together we continue on and catch up with each other.