Travel and first friendly.

 Day one in Thailand has officially ended for most athletes.  I know that I am completely exhausted from the last 2 days of our trip.  We left at 8:30 in the morning from the residence and headed to the airport.  Our first flight was delayed because of cloud cover for 45 minutes.  So our lay over in Vancouver was done. The plane was delayed more once after we loaded and we weren't sure when we left if we were going to make the connections to Hong kong in Vancouver.

During the flight the we found out that Air Canada had arranged for the Hong kong flight to wait for us, but we had to hustle.  We had 20 minutes to sprint across the entire Vancouver airport.  We all made it with myself coming in last by about five minutes from everyone else.  Thank goodness for the moving sidewalks in the airport.

The flight to Hong kong was the longest flight of my life.  Being cooped up in the seat for over 13 hours was tough on me mentally.  Plus the time changed.  Then in Hong Kong we had a five hour layover.  I finally dozed off on the benches waiting, 30 minutes before we had to check in.  Through all of this the team was excellent.  They represented Canada well.  On the flight to Hong Kong, I walked around the cabin a bit trying to get some blood pumping.  During the walk, I saw Noe was watching a movie on TV. and sitting next to her were two young children and one of them had actually fell asleep laying on her lap during the flight. 

We arrived at the Hotel just a little before 2am.  The hotel we are staying at in Thailand was short 3 rooms the first night.  So the coaches had to stay in a different hotel and then move into the team hotel the next afternoon.  Before we left last week Tammy and Julie talked with our team and said be flexible because the schedule changes and does it ever. So we were in a nice room with a hard futon bed.  It would take some time to get use to if that was what we were sleeping on for the entire trip.

We had a practice today from 10-noon and discovered our gym.  It is a ten minute walk in some good heat and humidity.  When we get there we are warm. The gym is nice but no air-conditioning and has fans and windows open everywhere.  Pretty typical of what you would see in some of the warmer climate.

We played an evening match against one of the University teams in Thailand.  Ayutthya University.  We were told they finished third in their league last season.  Sow e were expecting a prototypical fast asian offence.
We started
Shanice, Lisa, Jaki, Marie Sophie, Jaimie, Tricia and Noe for our first official friendly match.  I don't think the Thai team was really prepared to face our size.  The first set we cam out blocking and and created a comfortable lead.  Alain pulled a double sub at the end of the match with Alex and Krista, then Bethe coming on in a serving role.  We held on to win 25-21. That is where the heat and humidity of the gym wore off us. We seam to just take off after that set winning the match in straight sets.  The last two sets were of identical scores. 25-11 25-11.  WE played the remainder of the team in the third set and they kept the momentum right to the end. Krista led the team with 7 kills. She did this in 1.5 sets of playing time.  Another impressive set of stats were Jaimie's 5 kills and 5 stuff blocks.  The Thai team had real trouble with our block>  In the third set Alex was challenged to be a bit creative and Kristi was on the end of a huge 33 leftside attack.  Alex had sent the middle 31 and both blockers bit on the 31 with a quick block just over top Kristi had no one to stop her.

Tomorrow is going to be a good challenge as we play a decent Japanese all-star team.