Waow, time is flying by! It is already Sunday, meaning that today was our last day of our Tour Guide Training. We saw some sad faces (becomes the Training is already over), some tired faces and uncountable proud and excited faces who can't wait to start the new riding season!

We spent the morning doing a first aid course - thanks Walter and Stefanie from the Austrian Red Cross Team for organizing the course for us! Special thanks to Anthony for helping with the translation and for taking care of an English speaking group!  It was a great morning, and while we hope that no one needs to put it into practice, we are prepared to do first aid if necessary...

Of course, a special focus was placed on motorcycle accidents and everyone practiced how to handle such a difficult situation.

The different kinds of helmets and opening systems are challenging  to deal with.

How to do medical bandaging was up next, Franz and Steve are practicing to be prepared for real life situations.

Walter gave us great advice on how to salvage an injured person - Paul, Axel and Gottfried prove that it really works.

And if you look at Marko, you can tell that a little bit of fun was involved too.

Anthony explains how to make a compression Bandage if needed - Tedy, Björn, Martin and Florian pay close attention.

Today lunch was served by the "Grillkönig" - another sunny and perfect day for a BBQ lunch!

Our trailers are not only used for our transports, but also as picnic tables or sun decks.

And finally, here you see our Tour Guide Team 2015 - what a great Team! Thanks for being part of Edelweiss and for guiding our customers all around the world! You are the best and we are very proud to have the best Team working for us!

See you all on tour!

Today was the day when the rest of our Tour Guide Team arrived in Mieming! Welcome to all of you, great to see you all again. At least once a year we all meet up and it is always fun to see the "old faces" again

This is what you call a "great Tour Guide Team"! Rainer started the day with company news and future developments, followed by a talk by Conni on financial news and Karin, who talked about our Marketing strategies.

While our experienced Guides enjoyed the talks, our new Tour Guides prepared a famous EdelweissBikeTravel picnic for all of us. This year we had a competition between team Holland and team Bavaria. See for yourself how well they did.

Claudia shows us how a proper "Brettl Jausn" is prepared - meat lovers are perfectly right in Germany!

Many helping hands on team Holland!

If you are creative enough you can even take a top case as bread bowl. Great idea team Bavaria.

Proudly presenting the Dutch picnic.

You can tell that the experienced guides approve the work of the new staff members.

Well done Team Holland and Team Bavaria. We will see tonight which team wins the price of best picnic!

And off we go to our evening activity!

We enjoyed a traditional Austrian meal. before we went on to our annual celebration of our Tour Guides of the year!

Have a guess, who is this?

Team "Wild Hogs" with our experienced Guide Florian won this years Tour Guide Rallye - congratulation, you solved all the tasks and were the first ones to finish!

The "Icebreakers" finished second, congrats also to you - and Christian, who was not able to take part in the awarding - which meant that more of the price was left for the other guys

"Die 6 der gloreichen 8" won the 3rd Position. In this groupe there were two of the experienced guides who guided the new ones - thanks Ursula and Manuel!

The 4th position was taken by the "ELBs - Edelweiss Last Boyscouts", under the guidance of Michael!

And finally the group "Schweinseigerln" finished the Rallye as well - thanks Anthony for guiding the way back to the garage - and next year mobile phones will be collected before the Rallye beginns

We also awarded todays best picnic. And the second place goes to: Team Bavaria!

And the winners of the best picnic Award is: Team Holland!

Thank you all for your ideas and preparations of the picnic - both Teams did really well!

And finally, the Highlight of the night was the awarding of the "Tour Guides of the Year 2014"! Only Rainer knew at this stage and made us all very curiouse to find out!

Congratulations to Ursula (1st place), Marko (2nd place) and Franz (3rd plcae) together with Jens (3rd place) who unfortunately was not there in Person to receive the awarding! We are very proud of you guys! Well done and it is great to have you on our Tour Guide Team!

The Rookies of the year 2014 are Tedy and David - congrats to you as well! Also congratulations to our Bloggers of the year: Tom and Ursula - keep up the great work on our Blog! (We are really really sorry, but the camera died just while your awarding! So if anyone has got a picture of the Rookie or Blogger awarding, please send it to our Office Email)

Briefings, briefings and even more briefings. Today was another day of practice and expert talks on how to deal with difficult situations on tour. This perfectly prepared us for our afternoon Tour Guide event: a Tour Guide Rallye through Untermieming.

A wonderful morning awaited us on our 3rd training day.

Our Guide Christian talks about his experiences from the last 21 years of working for Edelweiss Bike Travel. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us!

Rainer knows a lot of stories to tell as well, thanks for sharing and giving advice to our new team members!

David, Björn and Eva are paying close attention to the real life stories of our experienced Guides.

And the coffee breaks in between the tasks are always used to share knowledge about bikes - of course. Here we are talking about our brand new Harley Davidson Softail, which Stephan just rode in this morning. Picture coming soon

Another brand new member of our Edelweiss fleet: our factory new Ford Ranger arrived today - ideal for delivering Pizza for our lunch break. Wim and Karin are obviously enjoying the food and the talks.

Edelweiss is spoiling us: great food, great people and great weather!

Stephan and Franziska take out the new Harley to follow our Teams on their Rallye Tour - we needed to make sure that no one got lost

The last task was the most challenging one: how to put 12 nails on top of 1? Florian, Rob, Guido and Eva are trying, and trying and managed it. Congratulations!

Claudia, Ursula, Martin, Manuel, Peter and Manuel also did their best, and manage to solve the task as well.

And here is the solution to the challenge: well done Björn, Andreas, Christian and Christian!

Congratulations to team Michael, Holger, Rico, Pablo and Björn!

Team Anthony, Wim, David, Tom and Oliver also found the solution - congrats guys!

Another purpose of our new Ranger - a mobile sun deck! Another day fully loaded with information and tasks to do. And on we move to our evening entertainment programm. (Obviousely we won't add fotos of these activities on our blog )

Day 2 of our Tour Guide training focused on hands-on practice. Checking electrical problems, fixing tires, doing a technical check on brakes and chains, and some Gulasch Suppe for lunch. And you know what, by the end of the day the new Guides even got some homework to do, as there are so many things to learn ...

One of our most experienced Tour Guides, Christian, explained how a proper motorcycle hand over should be done.

Loading bikes on our 10m long trailer is another challenge. Martin managed it like a professional Well done!

Our financial expert Conni explains how we Tour Guides get our money after the work is done. For sure, talking about money kept us all awake!

How can you fix a tire when it has about 10 screws in it? No problem for our professional team, under the guidance of Stephan!

Björn und Tom proudly managed to fix their tire - congratulation guys!

Another challenge was to change a light bulb on a R1200RT. Claudia and Oliver a great team!

Even our Guides who started last year were thought some interesting things from our mechanics Tom and Jens. And David is still smiling at the end of the second day. See you all tomorrow!

The snow is melting in the Austrian Alps, motorcycle riders are getting itchy to start riding their bikes again after the winter months and so we invited all our Tour Guides for our annual training. Our Guides from all over the globe come together for about a week to get updated and be prepared for the upcoming riding season. Our training started yesterday with our 11 new Tour Guides and we are happy to welcome them on our team. Yesterday they were introduced to our Edelweiss philosophy and the Edelweiss secrets

Markus talking about his famous real life Tour Guide stories and what it really means to be an "Edelweiss Bike Travel Tour Guide"

After the talks we all needed a strengthening BBQ meal - and this in March! Thank you Jens for the delicious meat-lover and vegetarian BBQ!

Everyone is enjoying their lunch time, getting to know each other and enjoying the food.

The office staff members and the company owners Coral and Werner were also curious to get to know our new Tour Guides and joined us for lunch. Plus as you can tell from the look on Gerhards face, they were quite hungry as well

After an exciting day fully loaded with Edelweiss information we enjoyed a dinner at our base Hotel in Mieming. Thank you guys for a great first day of our Training. It is great to have you on our team and don't worry, we will continue tomorrow...