Here we are in the beautiful seaside town of Roseto degli Abruzzi, where the water is actually swimmable! It’s a lovely beach and you can see the stadium on the right of the photo.

You may have noticed that I was getting a little behind on the postings, so now that we’re here in Italy with a nice breezy internet café it’s time to get right up to date (the net café in Bahrain was a smoke filled dungeon.)

An almost-teary farewell with Marko, Lena, Olli and Lutz on Sunday morning started us on our trip to Italy. A 1hr bus to Hamburg and a nice short flight got us to Rome by 4pm where we met up with Kate at the airport. The four of us (Kate, Jason Kruger, Duck and I) piled our luggage into a rental station wagon and Duck and Jason punished it along the apparently speed limit free highways across the country to the west coast. The whole way was beautifly scenic with lush hills, snow capped mountains and plenty of old towns and castles perched on hill tops. We did the trip in about 3 hours, and got into Rosetto in time to book a hotel (opposite center court!), go for a jog and have a nice Italian dinner. Later we found out that the speed limit was actually 100. Hmmm.

We trained yesterday (Monday) three times, and ate a well deserved feast last night. The food here is of course delicious and pretty cheap. One short intense session against the Canadians (Kruger/Montgomery) after lunch today will be our final preparation for the qualifyer on Wednesday. We just scraped into one of the last spots in the 64 team qualifyer, and there are still 10 teams or so on the reserve list.

Duck and I both feel well prepared for this one: we got some good gym sessions in last week and had plenty of sideout and serving practice yesterday. It’s a tough looking qualifyer, so hopefully we are ready to give it our best.

Since we are still feeling so fit and injury free, I should really thank Nick Holmes (Sports Massage) and Carla Kleverlaan (Osteopath) for getting our bodies well prepared, and giving us some great stretching routines before we left.

Big day tomorrow. Wish us luck!

Brad