It was hot here today, in the 90s and rather humid as well. It wasn’t so bad playing, the issue is that not only is their no air conditioning here (other than in the Edeka grocery store…maybe that’s why I was there three times today!). There also are no fans used anywhere…not in any stores here and not in any hotels, really different. So swimming or ice cream are the ways to cool off…I chose the latter, eating a sundae while watching the cargo boats going by on the Rhine after tennis today.
I warmed up early, at 8, as usual. It was warm and actually steamy/foggy out,but the clouds quickly dissipated. Our doubles was scheduled for noon, and meanwhile I watched the men’s 80 (Wilfried Mahler vs Herbert Althaus; Mahler, a lefty, won) and women’s 70 finals, Michelle Bichon of France vs Anneke Jelsma (Bichon won). Heidi Eisterlehner beat Sylvia Bauwens 62 10 ret (Sylvia was ill..perhaps the heat).
We had a really nice doubles match, a bit too many lobs at the beginning (my fault!) but once we started going forward more we went from 5-5 to 75 50. I played with Olga Markova of Czech Rep and we played Margreth Beyer (Germany) and Jana Sedlakova also of Czech Rep. The challenge was that Olga doesn’t speak English much, “only” German, Czech and Russian…none of which I speak (a few words of German…my German and Olga’s English are on par). But it all worked out. Jana and Margreth rallied at 5-0, winning three games in a row and then went up 30-0, but we rallied to win the game and the match. One nice thing about playing yesterday at Remargen was the lack of proximity to a train track! Bad Breisig is a nice little town and everyone here was very nice, but I won’t miss the traffic or trains. Note the freight train in the background below.
For singles there’s prize money, but for doubles there’s flowers and wine, not so easy to carry on a train! So I left the pretty flowers with one of the tournament helpers and the wine with Olga who was traveling by car.
Draws: http://www.itftennis.com/seniors/tournaments/tournament/info.aspx?tournamentid=1100033165
Well done – as usual!
Another great success story and lovely photos. The West Side Tennis Club has the Long Island Railroad in the background, which I found fun when the whistle blew! Congrats and on and on to yet another adventure. It’s pretty hot here in the Mile High City too. .