Well, if all my career options in the future fail to pan out, I could always be a truck driver...

Maybe sometimes people wonder what it is like to be us. What do those athletes get up to travelling around the world for so many weeks on end?
Here's the truth: it's not as exotic as it sounds.

Bobsleigh is very different from a lot of other winter sports. Most winter athletes travel with a lot of gear, but most can usually take their skis or skates or boards or rifles with them on the road and on the planes from venue to venue. We have to lug around 170-plus kilos of awkward steel and fiberglass.

The bobsleds on the World Cup circuit are flown to each continent in big steel shipping crates filled with steel runners, toolboxes, sliding gear, lamps, heaters, wax, sandpaper, work tables... you name it, we have to pack it. In our program, it is the pilot's responsibility to make sure they have everything they could possibly need to repair, work-on and maintain their equipment. It's a lot to plan for, trust me.

It costs thousands of dollars to ship these things around the globe, so our World Cup tour is set up much differently than other sports. All the events are done on each continent before moving on to the next. For example, our first two World Cups this winter were in North America. Then the next six are in Europe. So the sleds move on huge flat bed trucks to a main shipping airport, then they are flown to Munich or Frankfurt Germany.

We have a week's break in the schedule to make sure that the equipment has time to safely arrive. The team then flies in. On average for the Canadian team, we pick up the vans, two cars and three giant trucks. Each truck fits two bobsleds plus all of the bags and gear.

We then drive. We drive and drive and drive.

We drive to our first European destination, unpack, set up our sleds, and complete our official qualifying training runs over the week. We race on the weekend.

Then we immediately load up all of the trucks and vans and we drive again. We drive and drive and drive.

This European stint so far has involved two road trips over 10 hours. Somedays I feel tired, but most of the time, I love this part of our sport. It has become part of the culture of what we do. Every fall, I make sure to pack my big European road atlas that has now been covered with ink indicating routes, tips, and notes to get us to our destinations safe and fast. I make eight CDs filled with my favourite songs to sing at the top of my lungs with my teammates when we are so tired that we can barely keep our eyes open.

You would be amazed at how well you can banish fatigue by having the windows down with minus-20-degree wind blasting in your face and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" blasting in the CD player.

I feel lucky to do what we do. I have driven through so many wonderful places. I've enjoyed so many sunsets and sunrises in the Alps. I've shouted and sworn at automated Italian toll booths, I've been searched by border patrols in Switzerland. I've been yelled at by the Austrian police. I've driven to the wrong country.

Actually this year, thanks to some small directional errors we ended up driving through five countries in one day: Germany Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Italy. It is a pretty impressive feat I think.

I've had frozen windshield fluid and solved the problem by using walkie-talkies to get our USA bobsledders spraying our windshield over the top of theirs while driving windy mountain roads. In the end, you just need to get from A to B somehow.

Now after years of experience I carefully select a teammate to ride in the truck with me who is an astute map reader, who is calm, who likes to sing really loud and most importantly, has a strong stomach and a big bladder. There are three things I hate about road trips: driving slowly, stopping lots and getting lost. All of those things are inevitable most of the time... especially the getting lost part.

This winter, apart from the five country detour, we also had an entertaining time trying to get from Cesana, Italy to Winterberg, Germany. It is another 10 hours drive.

We arrived in Germany after the sun had gone down. So, now it was dark and pouring with rain and foggy and as we arrive at the turn off we are horrified to discover that the road is closed. Now in the rain and fog, with vague directions and a road atlas, we have to try find some remote German village in a place where none of us speak the language.

I talk a lot about acquiring great stories to share with friends and loved ones. World Cup bobsleigh tour is one giant adventure, filled with so many stories that it would take pages and pages to share them with you. But what I do know is I love what I do and the bad times and challenges usually make for the funniest stories, anyway...