Today was really nice. It started early. I warmed up with Haim Ohn from Israel. He is a lefty and the 4th seed in the 55 men’s here and gave me a great warm up. I don’t know if I did the same but he won his quarterfinal match today after dropping the first set. I played Nora Blom. We went on Center Court after the men’s 75 final. Nick Ourusoff of USA was the top seed but lost 61 61 to another lefty from Italy, who was steady and strong. I played a good match and the altitude helped me today. I won 62 62.

Michael Beautyman played a good match against Bruno Renout of France, the top seed. The first set was still going as I took the court about 10am. Beautyman said he served for the first set and had many close games in the second set too, but fell 76 61 to yet another lefty.

After the medal ceremony, Bridget, Michael, Holly and I took the tram (cable car) up to the top (two trams actually) and went on the panoramaweg hike to Davos. It was warm even at over 2000 meters and a lovely day. After taking the wrong fork at the beginning, the walk was good and we didn’t get lost. It’s a popular walk as there’s not a lot of steep ups and downs…we encountered big groups of families and even a baby carriage or two on the walk. We figured if a five year old or someone pushin g a baby buggy could make it so could we. Bridget kept us to a brisk pace as the last funicular down was about 5pm. Bridget and her husband once took the tram up at Klosters, lost track of the time and had to walk down, which took them about 3 1/2 hours, and none of us, particularly Bridget, wanted to be hiking down at dusk.

The Panoramaweg goes along the side of the mountain with a beautiful view of the valley between Klosters and Davos and towards the end of Lake Davos and Davos Dorf.

We made good time and took the second to last funicular down. We found a nice place for a meal (Rosti for Bridget and me, which is sort of like hash browns with cheese and in our case Canadian bacon on top…it was excellent, particularly since we had only apples for lunch), and Kar Liang joined us for dessert. We all took the train back to Klosters, about a 20 minute ride.

Tomorrow I leave this beautiful place and take the train (3 changes of train…one is 6 minutes!) to Bad Breisig for the next tournament. It’s going to be very warm there tomorrow and I’ll be missing American air conditioning, but next week should be nice. Bad Breisig is a small town near Cologne, Germany right on the Rhein River.