Vinny’s Voyage by Vinny Galanti, NPC National Level Competitor When I got the news that Fitness Authority from Poland wanted me to come along for their Power Tour with The Lad and Ox, I was stoked to go on the trip. It would be a two week trip away from home, and I thought this opportunity to see parts of the world I’d never have a chance to see, I just could not turn it down. Our first stop was the FIBO in Essen Germany. At Newark Airport I met up with The Lad and G Diesel to catch our flight to Essen. The FIBO is very similar to the Arnold that we have here in March in Columbus, but the Europeans were a little shy to the spectacle of “The Cage”. At the FIBO we found out that Flex Wheeler would be on the tour with us in Poland, and we were all excited to get on the road and get on with the long 16 hour drive to our first stop in a city called Tychy. We started off at 9am on Monday April 14th. Ox and The Lad got in a van with Teddy the owner of Fitness Authority, and I drove with Arek, Dariusz, and Radek. 3 great guys that spoke decent English, and for most of the 16 hours we bullshitted about typical bodybuilding stuff.Radek and Arek are awesome bodybuilders, and Dariusz benched over 600 without a bench shirt at the FIBO. We pulled into our hotel about 11pm Monday night, and after getting our bags to our rooms...we headed downstairs to eat. Before I go any further, I have to say that any place we ate, the food was great… Even when we stopped at a rest area on the Autobahn. Imagine that coming from Vinny from Jersey. On Tuesday morning we got up and ate breakfast and headed out to the gym to go train. One more thing about the food, the eggs were the best we had ever eaten. Ever. The gym was no bigger than “The Cage” and they had a set of stairs like you would see in a submarine headed down into a pit that had all the leg equipment. Ox and I banged out some squats and hacks before we had to get to our first stop on the tour. These guys do not have the equipment that we have in our gyms, and let me tell ya that we saw some awesome physiques. They get the job done. We had an autograph signing at a supplement store call Profesjonalista. It was the smallest turn out of the tour; the bad weather had a big part in that. As soon as we were done we got back in the vans headed to a town called Gdynia, and that was about another 8 hours in the van, and at about this point in the trip, and I know it was only the 2nd day, we were a little sick of the van. We had another autograph signing at a store called Centrum Sprzedazy Odzywek, and it was a big turn out, with lots of fans who were already wearing Animal clothes, which I thought that was really cool. It is obvious the fever is spreading. Our next stop was on the 18th in a town called Rypin where we thought it was going to be a seminar conducted by Flex, but it turned out that we were all a part of it. They rented out an old play theater and we did the seminar on the stage.They had a nice dinner for us, and then a huge cake for my birthday. Next we spent 2 nights in Torun, and we had a chance to see old Torun, and most of the buildings were dated back to the 1300’s. Throughout the trip Ox had a great sense of humor, and I was getting on his nerves with always wanting to know where we were going next and we just kept busting each others balls. The Lad was great, the Polish people love him, and you can see he has a great love for the iron. One day we saw an old lady walking with her donkey from the market, and almost every time you looked you saw horses, donkeys, roosters, cows and other animals. Being from The States, I was buggin’ out. We trained a few times at some real hard core gyms, and everywhere we went the people were very friendly. All in all it was a trip to remember, and if I get invited back I’d go in a heartbeat.