Quick post before I try to get some jet lagged sleep here…

I arrived yesterday into Dusseldorf, Germany (via Frankfurt, from San Diego). My flight was on time to Germany. I had a decent cushion to make my next flight which was good because Customs was slow…we were held up one floor because there wasn’t room to process everyone downstairs. It was a hurry up and wait situation after that…I hurried to my flight and onto the plane…only to wait for about an hour before we took off. But halfway through the wait I fell asleep!

My tennis friend from So Africa, Jenny Cerff landed just before me and we met at the rental car agency. Though we had about the same length flights, she has no time change. I ended up with an automatic car of a brand I’d never heard of but it’s fine, not too big and has navigation.

We checked into our first hotel and then went out to the club, ETUF, which is on a small man made lake. The club has rowing, sailing, field hockey and tennis and is very nice. We wandered around and then Sabine Schmidt, the tournament director and a friend met us, showed us around the club house and we had a drink looking over the lake.

Jenny Cerff

Today we had a good hit in the morning on the red clay. It will take a while to get used to but the courts were very nice. There was no ice at the club so we hit the Edeka grocery store and found a bag of the precious stuff (for my shoulder and Jenny’s drink) and moved to our new hotel, a Mercure which is quite nice. Sabine has negotiated nice prices here.

We then went to a Tennis-Point store which is sort of like a Tennis Express at home, a large tennis store (no Volkl racquets though 😠). We will be back, it has a plethora of clay court shoes of all brand types.

That’s it for now…tomorrow we’ll practice again and perhaps do a bit of site seeing again.