Yassen Savov reports on the Nordic Paragliding Open:<\/p>\n
Every year, when the great northern snows melt and the urge to be in the sun is too strong to resist by even the most powerful and fierce and fearless and hugely moustachioed of them, the Viking warriors of all of Scandinavia put on their traditional EN-certified horned helmets, board the wooden sail ships, and converge from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland to some carefully chosen sun-struck piece of heaven lower down in Europe, carrying, instead of their double-bladed axes, a paraglider each – and a nice racing one, whenever possible – so they can fight out the battle of the Flying Vikings and raise up some big wooden mugs and shout, red burned happy faces cheering all together: \u201cSKOL!\u201d<\/p>\n
This year that carefully chosen sun-struck piece of heaven was the Italian town of Gemona del Friuli, which – cuddled in the corner between Venezia, Austria, and Slovenia (location sounds not so bad, doesn’t it?), and having both sharp mountains and quite thermally flatlands – delivered on all fronts. We had three very nice tasks, jumping from mountains to flatlands and back, and, even though the length and difficulty of the tasks …read more<\/a> <\/p>\n