Arrival in Germany

We've arrived here in Germany safe and sound. Veronica and I arrived at the hotel one right after the other. I can't tell if her driver was super fast or mine was just a little on the slower side since I didn't see her in the baggage claim and her van pulled up right behind my van at the hotel. Well, everyone got here which is the main thing. One of the benefits of living near a major airport like Los Angeles is having a direct flight...I never get tired of flying business class.

One of the challenges of travelling around the world is trying to deal with jet lag. One of the tricks we've tried to employ is to immediately get on the new time zone. Since we arrived around the middle of the night according to my internal clock, the challenge was to keep busy. I checked out the room and the view and unpacked before lunch. I took some photos of the room, but I'm having a little trouble uploading them right now. I'm hoping things will speed up once there are fewer people connecting. After lunch, there was the obligatory walking around the hotel to see what was what. The great about being one of the first people to arrive at a tournament is getting to welcom each new arrival. Even though it's been months since we last saw each other, it's almost as if it were yesterday.

Since I had seven or eight hours until I could legitimately go to sleep, I decided to go for a short jog around Frankfurt to loosen up a bit. Frankfurt has some lovely parks with cool statues, especailly right around where our hotel is located. The city is a really cool mixture of modern skyscrapers and historic architecture. At one point, I stumbled on what appeared to be a business district. I felt a bit out of place in running clothes, but I figured I could be forgiven as just another crazy American.

We had our first training this morning and the facilities are beautiful. We did a little technical training with some penalty area decisions working on teamwork and we also did standard running exercises to get back in the swing of things. Now that everyone is here and we're really getting into it, it's hard to contain the sense of excitement and anticipation. So, we're here and just enjoying every minute as it comes.