May 10, 2024, Friday

Wednesday was just a practice day in Essen. I hit with a teammate, Reinhilde in the morning, visited Lidl (of course) etc in the afternoon and hit with Patrick who plays #1 on the men’s 50 team for ETUF Essen (many thanks to Sabine for organizing the hits!). The weather in the afternoon was great and it was a nice day.

Yesterday, Thursday, was a holiday in Germany, called Victory Day. As on all holidays, all shops and businesses other than restaurants and those located in train stations, airports and gas stations were closed.

I drove to the Bonn area to hit with Bunnie Jackson from USA who is playing for the Bonner Tennis and Hockey Club (BTHV). It’s a very busy club…she had to persuade them to give us two hours to practice and we were bumped promptly after two hours even though we started at noon!

We had a good practice, then drove to Bonn as I hadn’t seen it before. It’s the capital of Germany and the birthplace of Beethoven. It was a gorgeous spring day, highs in the low 70s and people were eating outside, many bocce games (with people of all ages) were ongoing near the river, the students from Bonn University were sprawled on the campus lawn and we saw several plazas and old buildings.

We had a few u-turns trying to find parking but finally found a big parking garage near the main train station. The paying system was interesting…no ticket needed, you just put in your license plate number when ready to pay and it calculates the fee and uses a camera to look at the plate when exiting. However you do need the license plate number to reenter the garage so taking a photo of it before exiting is very important! And this garage did accept USA credit cards (there was no cash pay option).

After walking around for a while we drove to another tennis club, this a smaller one (just tennis) and very pretty, the Hangelar Tennis Club, also near Bonn, where Bunnie’s husband Stuart is playing on a 65 team and Tom Coulter (who was a member (#1 singles) of the USA Men’s 60 team which won the gold medal last week in Mexico City) is playing on a men’s 60 team. Tom speaks good German and has been on a team in Germany for many years.

We had dinner overlooking the courts (small menu but really good food), and then I drove back to Essen, hit the gym and am now off for more tennis in Essen.

We play our second team match tomorrow then back to the USA for me on Sunday.