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November 24, 2008

Ashley Weinhold's Start of Tournament #3 in Spain & update

Hello everyone!

Sorry for the delayed blog from the past few days, I haven't had internet access since Friday. My Dad arrived safely in Barcelona on Friday and I was very excited to see him. We did some sightseeing around the city and got lost half of the time by car and foot, but it was fun overall. We drove down to Vall De Uxo Saturday afternoon which turned out to be a 2-3 hour drive. When we got into the little town we found the host hotel for the tournament which turns out to be the only hotel in the town. They didn't have our reservation so we had to find another hotel outside of the town which was actually another interesting experience. It was like a truck stop, we had dinner at the cafeteria there, but it turned out to be okay. On Sunday morning we checked back at the host hotel and they found a room for us for the week so that was good, it's a bit on the small side, but not too bad. Also while we were checking in I ran into Lucia, the girl I played in the finals of doubles last week and she asked me to play doubles here so that worked out well. We headed over to the club and found out that they only have 4 clay courts. We also found out that main draw singles and doubles starts on Monday rather than the usual Tuesday start. I also signed in for doubles with Lucia, we barely made the deadline because it was at noon on Sunday instead of the usual noon on Monday deadline. Good thing we headed over to the club early. Since they were playing qualifying matches on the 4 clay courts I hit on the backboard of some squash type court for about 30mins and then jumped on a hard court for a little bit also. The courts and practice situation makes things a bit more interesting. I guess everyone who is not the 1st match on has to warm up on the hard court. Hopefully that will change once the main draw gets started.

Since there were so many rounds of qualifying matches to be played, Dad and I decided to drive to Valencia which is about 40km away to find a clay court to practice on. We searched all over the place and never found a clay court, no one we asked knew where a court was either. Tennis courts seem to be few and far between here. I've never seen so many squash and paddle tennis courts before, they seem to be everywhere, too bad it's the wrong sport! So after that pretty much worthless adventure around Valencia we ended up just heading back to the sight and waited for the matches to finish. We shared a court for about an hour before it got too dark, I had a good hit though. Almost everything here is closed on Sundays, but luckily the restaurant next to our hotel was open so we had a nice dinner there.

Now moving onto today...I got to sleep in a little bit this morning. I haven't been sleeping too well lately, maybe it's from all the traveling and changing cities, hotels, beds, etc. Anyways, we loaded up on breakfast items and snacks at the grocery store for the next few days. I had lots of laundry that needed to be washed, we found a place in town, but they said they only did dry cleaning. But they were nice enough to take care of it for me. I'm looking forward to clean clothes on Wednesday, I know it sounds ridiculous, but traveling with dirty clothes on the road is a pain. I've noticed that my Spanish is no bueno since we've been in this new town, very few people understand or know more than a couple words of English. We were fortunate that most people in Barcelona and Mallorca knew atleast some English. I seem to understand it fairly well, but speaking it is another obstacle. We had lunch at the club and waited to practice on a clay court in the afternoon. We finally got on half a court, but we only had it for 45mins. In the middle of our practice it started pouring so we had to get off for a few mins, but we didn't want to wait so we just hit in the rain. Then all of a sudden it started hailing! It was like a little snow flurry, it didn't last very long though. I don't know exactly what it was, but it was pretty weird. After our time was up on the clay I hit a little more on the backboard. We waited for the schedule to come out and found out that I play 1st up at 10am against (2)Cagla Buyukakcay from Turkey. We're the #1 seeds in doubles, but we don't play our 1st round until Wednesday. I'm looking forward to starting up my 3rd tournament tomorrow morning and continuing to improve my level of play on the clay. I'll update you guys again tomorrow after my match. Bye!

Posted by Jack Newman at November 24, 2008 3:42 PM