AVP Santa Barbara/Ft. Lauderdale

This weekend is the first AVP event of the season that I've attended! Today was the qualifier. Unfortunately, it didn't go as well as I'd hoped :( I played with Tori Grafeman who is a year older than me and is kind of in the same place in her career as I am. We were excited to play together since we both want to be great beach players and we want to do it faster than the norm (which is about 3-4 years of playing before really getting into the main draw much)!

We won the first match pretty handily. It was super windy, but having Nancy Mason there to coach us helped a TON!!! She was able to give us great strategies and by listening to her we won pretty easily :) The second match was a much better match and way more fun to play, even though we lost. The first game was a little shakey because we were playing a pretty good team and that was our first test. The game was close but we lost. The second game was much better! We got a lot more fired up and confident in what we were doing which was so much fun! And the third game was back and forth the whole time but we just couldn't pull it out at the end.

So, yes it was a bummer, but I think Tori and I could be great partners with some more training together! We only practiced together twice this week before playing together, haha, oh beach volleyball!

Now, the back up plan is for us to fly to Ft. Lauderdale tomorrow to play in the AVP U26 tournament. The problem is, there are only 9 teams signed up and we need 12 to make it an AVP sanctioned event. That means, if we don't have 12 teams, they still give prize money, but no AVP points are awarded. It seems like it would still be worth it to go, but the points are the more precious thing to us!! :)

I'll keep everyone updated on what happens! Hopefully I get good news tonight from my old boss Al Lau and I find out 12 teams are signed up and we're good to go! :)

Have a great night!!

Au Revoir Cote d'Azur!

Nadal!!!

Prince Albert

(I actually took this picture!!!)

The Cascade on the Castle hill

Ahh, it looks like I might finally be heading back to the states! Although, I haven't actually gotten on the plane yet, so who knows what will happen?

This trip was amazing for so many different reason! I played my very FIRST international volleyball tournament!!! I met a lot of fantastic people, volleyball and otherwise. And, I saw by far some of the most beautiful places on earth! I really wish I could put into words, or even show you with pictures how gorgeous these spots are. Even the pictures don't do it justice! They really mean it when they say Cote d'Azure aka blue coast. The water is sooo blue, and so many different colors of blue!

For a short synopsis on the trip-

I flew into Nice and stayed my first night here. I didn't get in until late (missed my connecting flight) so I pretty much went to dinner, walked around some, and then went to bed. Next day I walked around a little, bought some strawberries and a croissant from the market (Cours Selayar) in Old Nice. The Cours Selayar is a very famous flower market/farmer's market in Vieux Nice (Old Nice). I went and met up with Cayley, and hopped on a bus to Monaco.

We made it into Monaco, checked in, and changed to go practice. We walk down to the beach and after many failed attempts to actually get down onto the beach (getting out of the hotel was tricky) we finally made it to the court. Remember, 99% of the beaches around here are rocky so we're walking down wondering how in the world this will work! We got to the court, only to find no net and no balls. No problem, sort of, at least we brought our own ball! However, we were only allowed to use the last 10 feet of the court, haha. It was a short practice to say the least. We showered and changed for the tourney dinner that night. First, we watched a sponsor tourney (the sponsors had a few representatives and they just goofed around playing matches), then they drew for positions in the pool. Only two teams were seeded to begin with, Latvia- the European Cup Champs, and France- won the tourney last year. They literally drew names out of a hat to seed the rest.

Anyway, we had dinner and went up to bed to rest for Friday. Friday we played Switzerland first. It wasn't a bad match for us, but it wasn't great either and we ended up losing to Switzerland, which proved to be a really bad loss :( considering that was the one we needed to stay in the tourney. We had a lot of time off so Cayley and I did a little site seeing in between matches. Then the next match was Denmark, who we beat in 2. Still wasn't an awesome match but we started finding a groove. They were just an interesting team to play because they were small and kind of unconventional aka they mis-hit the ball a lot and things like that. After that we had even more time off, so we went upstairs to the hotel room to relax. Before we went upstairs we asked the Swiss girls who they were playing next because we wanted to watch their match against France so we could scout France. They assured us that they were playing Denmark next so we went upstairs for a few hours, only to come back down and find out they either a. just didn't know what they were talking about or b. lied so we couldn't watch the match (we're still not sure which one it was!). After all that mess, we ended up losing to France. We actually played decently well but needed to execute our game plan just a little better. I'd say for having to 5'9" girls playing a 6'4" girl we did pretty well though! Haha

So, that was the end of the tourney for us, but after our last match an American, John, came over and introduced himself. He has lived in Monaco now for about 3 years so he invited us to come hang out with him and his friends. After a lot of chatting with tournament people, the cute little tournament helper boy Ludovic (who happened to be the President of the tourney's son and our BIGGEST fan there), and other random photographers and people, we made our way to hang out with the group. They ended up being great people and we sat and chatted for a few hours. We then went straight to dinner, still dirty, with some tournament people and players. While at dinner we ran into..... drum roll please..... Rafael Nadal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Soooooo cool!!! We finished up dinner, quick showered and changed, and then went out to meet up with the tourney people again. It was nice of them to set up a little get together at a club/bar type place, so we went and said hi. But we had arranged to meet up with our American friend and his friends so we left after a little bit and met up with them. We had a super fun night!!! The people we met were just such a great group of people that it really made the trip for us!

After a really late night, we hung out at the pool for awhile, and then, went to watch one semi-final game and the final match of the tournament. Finals were Italy vs. France. It was actually a very fun atmosphere and a pretty good crowd! Italy ended up winning it all which I was happy about because the girls couldn't have been any sweeter. Oh and we met the Prince of Monaco!!! Prince Albert!! Our group of friends from the night before had come back to hang out, so we sat with them and hung out for a few hours. Ended up going out with them again which was just so much fun, again! We went to the casino for a little bit, which was really really neat! Such a different feel than any casino I've been in. It was very serious and formal, and definitely not cheesy like Vegas!

Sunday, Cayley and I did our touristy thing a little and went to the palace and got some souvenirs! At one point, we were trying to get to the casino by bus (it's a 5-10 min walk, but we had our luggage and it's uphill) and we just missed the bus we wanted. We were thinking, no big deal, we'll just catch the next one, it shouldn't be more than 15 mins.... wrong!!! 40 mins later the next bus came and it was jam packed! Kind of a random story, but it was hilarious at the time. After that fiasco we finally hopped on a train to Cannes!

The train to Cannes was also packed because there was a train strike and lots of trains weren't running that day. Oh, not to mention no one in Europe could fly anywhere because of the dumb volcano!!!! That was another fiasco where Cayley and I literally just forced our way onto the train, stacking our luggage on other people's and getting tons of dirty looks along the way. Haha. We made it into Cannes late afternoon so we checked into our hotel (we got lost first, of course) and did some site seeing. We pretty much just walked around and took pics, and found a place to eat. We were so exhausted from the long weekend that we went back and passed out afterwards!

Next morning we got up right away and hopped on a train then bus to Saint Paul de Vence, a cute little artsy town built in an old castle area. It really was just adorable!! And, we found more souvenirs (mostly for ourselves :D ). The one thing we were told to do there was to eat at/look around Colombe d'Or- thanks Holly McPeak! Now, I didn't know much about it, and neither did Cayley but WOW! First of all, it was beautiful. Just a really old style restaurant/hotel with lots of greenery, cute tables, beautiful artwork, great view, etc. And, the food was awesome! Pricey, yes, but awesome. And the waiter we had was a character! He was an older man, and the first thing we said to him was, we'd like to eat at your restaurant, and can we leave our bags here? Which is funny to us now because we know how nice of a place it is and probably how big of a deal itw as for us to ask!! Haha. Anyway, the waiter looked a little suspicious of us, but we sweet-talked him and he ended up loving us by the end of lunch! So, lucky for us we got to leave our luggage there all day so we could tour with out, such a relief! A few hours later, we came back to get our stuff and head back to Nice. By the way, if it gives you any idea of how popular/exclusive this place is, we saw people turned away from going to look at the inside because they weren't patrons. So weird!

We had about a 40 min bus trip, where we both took power naps, and then we were in Nice. This is when craziness began! Long story short (too late, I know) we sat at a McDonald's for a good 7 hours! Why one might ask? Because that's the only place we could get internet!!! And, my computer didn't even work, only Cayley's so we had to take turns! We needed the internet because I found out my flight was cancelled and Cayley had no idea what was going on with hers! In the end, Cayley's flight went on schedule and I got rescheduled to leave Thursday! Which was actually super lucky because I got 2 extra days in an incredible place, but wasn't "stuck" here for a week and a half like some people.... oh and by the way, this is only true if my plane tomorrow actually takes off. I guess there is still a possibility I could be here for another week, haha, but I'm going to assume my flight will go as scheduled tomorrow.

So, did I pout and mope around because my flight was cancelled? Absolutely NOT! I checked into a new hostel close to Vieux Nice, and went site seeing on my own! I went to Cours Selayar and got cheese and apples, had a nice little snack on the beach, then walked up to the old castle area. WOW! You walk up quite a ways, to find yourself at a beautiful park (the castle is long gone) and overlooking all of Nice! Whenever I talk to people about my time in Switzerland I tell them how Interlaken is probably my favorite place in the entire world... and now I can tell them that the top of the castle in Nice is a close second, or maybe even tied for first. You can't even imagine the views! Not to mention the waterfall! Yeah, a waterfall on the side of this hill/mountain/castle thing... just incredible! After a great day, I came back to my hostel where I met my 3 American roommates whom I proceeded to go to dinner with. Super fun! I just love meeting people! We hung out in Vieux Nice after dinner then turned in for the night.

Today I was going to go to St. Tropez but it was a little expensive/hard to get to and around so I decided to save that for another time. Then, I was going to go to Eze ( a little midieval town just east of Nice), so I called my friend Yana that I met in Monaco and she met me at the train station there! (Side note, Yana is Russian so it made me think of Anna the whole time we hung out :) ) Apparently, Eze has two parts, Eze sur mer (by the sea) or Eze Village (up in the mountains) and we went to the boring one, boo. Yana had looked around already, so I literally got off the train to say hi to her, and then we hopped right back on the same one and went back to Monaco. We were going to get on the bus that went up to Eze Village but we couldn't figure out when it came and we knew it was only once every 2 hours or so. So, we walked around a few places I hadn't seen, and then had lunch and chatted. She's such a great girl!!

And after a bus ride, and a dinner and glass of wine by myself (I love being independent), I am back in the hostel catching up on internet-ing!

Hope I caught everyone up. I wish I could describe better how AMAZING this trip has been! I definitely recommend a vacation here to everyone! :D

And now, I'm finally going to get some sleep!

Goodnight y'all!

PS I'm going to have to figure out a way to post albums because I have a million pictures to share!

Nice!!!

I'm here! After a long day of travel, I finally made it :) I took off from LA at 12:30 yesterday afternoon, (which is 9:30 pm over here) and made it into my hostel around 7:30 pm! Surprisingly, I"m not as exhausted as I expected (probably because I slept almost the entire time on all 3 of my flights, haha).

My flight from LA to Houston was pretty easy, I just tried to stay awake as much as possible so I could get in sync with this time zone as quickly as possible. Hung out in Houston, got some food and a converter, and hopped on my flight to Frankfurt. The plane was a 2, 3, 2 and I ended up with two seats to myself so I curled up and slept as much as I could. Unfortunately, we got into Frankfurt like 15 minutes late, which was just late enough for me to miss my flight to Nice :( We had to get shuttled from the plane to the terminal, then wait in the customs line, and then I had to go back through security! By the time that was over, I got to my gate at exactly my departure time and the plane, of course, had already backed away from the gate. I was bummed because it cut out time from being a tourist today, but it wasn't that big of a deal. I hung out, had a German beer (sorry parents, but when you're here, you have to get it) and took advantage of the FREE cappuccinos. Yes, I said FREE! There was a machine at every Lufthansa gate, and it served any kind of coffee you wanted, and it cost nothing! How great is that?

I finally hopped on my flight to Nice and immediately passed out (which I was trying not to do). I ended up sleeping until the second we touched the ground. Once I got into Nice, everyone was super nice and helpful. The info guy at the airport helped me hop on a bus into "Old Nice" or "Vieux Nice". And then a nice man on the bus saw me looking at a map, and he ended up needing to get off at the same stop so he pointed me in the right direction. It still took me about 20 times of walking right past my hostel to figure out where it was. In my defense, there's no sign on the door, or anywhere for that matter. I was just supposed to know that it was number 20 and know that I was supposed to ring the doorbell, haha. I'll take pictures in the daylight tomorrow so you can see what I'm talking about! The guy working when I got here was American though, so that was helpful.

I finally got settled in, checked my email and headed out for dinner. It was pretty dark, and kind of late by the time I got on the road, so I just did a little bit of walking around and found a cute Italian place for dinner. It was really yummy and the people were soo nice! Now I'm back at the hostel and I'm probably going to hit the sack fairly soon!

I took a video because I've been promising to do that, but it's not that exciting :/ I'll get better as I get more experience, I promise!

Hope you enjoy it!

Au revoir :)

It's Here!!!

Tomorrow is the day, it has finally come... I leave for my Monte Carlo tournament!!!! Yea!!!! I can't wait to go represent the US in beach volleyball! I'm also super excited that I get to go and do it with my friend Cayley Thurlby!

So far, the plan is for me to leave tomorrow at 12:30 and get into Nice, France at 2:30 on Wednesday afternoon. I'm going to head straight to my hostel and put my things up, then do some touristy things! I figure it will be good to get my blood pumping so I get on the France/Monaco time zone quicker!! :) Plus, I just really want to use my time there to see EVERYTHING that I can!! It will be fun to walk around by myself some because I feel like it always ends up being a fun adventure doing stuff alone. Then, Thursday morning I'll hang around, do some more site seeing (or maybe just sitting on the beach) until I meet Cayley at the airport in the afternoon when she gets in. We're going to head to Monaco together as soon as she gets in! We'll meet up with the volleyball peeps and they'll take it from there.

Once we're doing volleyball stuff, I think they have some things they have planned. Thursday night there's a dinner or meet and greet type thing. And, obviously Friday is volleyball all day! As long as we finished 1st or 2nd in the pool (which we will!) we play Saturday as well. Saturday is semi-finals and finals! If we play on Saturday we get to stay at the hotel provided by the tournament people an extra night which would be nice!

After volleyball Cayley and I are going to do some traveling together! We'll do a day in Nice (probably Monday) and a day in Cannes, we think.

So, I absolutely cannot wait!!! I will be bringing my camera, computer, and Flip cam so hopefully I'm able to upload some pictures, write some stories, show some videos, etc. while it's going on!

Back to Europe I go! :)

Flip cam!!!!

Get ready for some video blogging!!! I just received my new Flip cam in the mail!! Courtesy of Scott (early birthday gift, kind of thing). Thanks :)

Anyway, sorry if the title got you all excited for a video. I know, y'all can barely contain yourself waiting for the first video... I promise, there will be one soon!!

On another note, I'm getting closer and closer every day to figuring out who my partner will be for the season!!! Yea! Finally!

Also, I'm trying to work my magic with potential sponsors as well! Wish me luck and say a little prayer or two if you don't mind :)

Video is soon to come!!

The Easter Bunny

Yes, the Easter Bunny still comes even when you're 26! :)

This is what he left for Scott. And, he told Scott he was supposed to share it with me, so don't worry, I wasn't left out!

When you were younger and your older sister's friends were babysitting you, what helped you sleep better? a. soothing jungle noises b. sticking your hand in a bowl of warm water

Haha well, since both have actually been done to me, I can answer honestly that the answer is c. all of the above.... Oh wait... Haha :) Man, I remember being so mad at the time when I woke up with my hand in the water, but now I can't stop laughing thinking about it!!!

Ask me anything

Beautiful San Diego!

Well, since I'm on Spring Break I made a trip down to San Diego to hang out with Scott for a few days! He and his roommate and friend from high school are living for a month in a penthouse apartment overlooking Petco Park and because they are so high up, it over looks A LOT of other pretty parts of San Diego! Long story short, Scott and Steve were supposed to move into an apartment across the street from Petco but the guy bailed on them with 2 days left before they moved in!!!! Yeah, so rude... I couldn't believe it!!! But, Steve is a property manager and was able to find a great deal for the place they are staying now for a month, and already has a new place lined up for move-in in a month! They are both great locations and about a great a price as you can find around here :)

I set up a few work outs while I was down here (so that I didn't have to drive back and forth a million times to play volleyball) and I had my first one this morning! I got to play with Kim McGiven, who went to Santa Clara, her partner Julianna, Beth VanFleet and Heather Lowe in Mission Bay. It was a great day on the beach, besides the fact that it rained this morning (YES, it does rain in San Diego!!!!) so the ground was super hard. It was sunny and the temperature was great for playing! All in all, I would call it a successful day!

Now, I get to relax for awhile until Scott gets off work and enjoy the view and weather from the balcony! :) Yea for Spring Break!!!!!!