Day 1, December 27, 2005
Traveling to Venice
By Chelsea Kirschman and Alexia Tandron

Today, our first day, we mainly flew all day. One of the fun things some of the girls did was a limo ride to New York City during our 7 hour lay-over there. Our limo driver, Tony, showed us the city in our Hummer-Limo. We laughed and waved at the people that took pictures of us. They must have thought we were stars! Then we went to lunch at a fancy Italian restaurant and everyone liked the food. We visited “Ground Zero” and The Rockefeller Center and then went back to the airport for our flight over the Atlantic.

With all of our long flights everybody kept busy by watching movies, sleeping and eating on the planes. This morning we were so tired we took a nap on the floor of the Paris airport upon arrival there. Everyone who walked by looked at us.

Almost everybody arrived late to Venice because of missed flights, late arrivals of other planes, and defrosting of the planes. Tim and Cory, our BIP leaders, met us and showed us the way to the buses. Once the first group arrived in Venice, they ate at a restaurant and had great Italian pizza for lunch. Later they got on the bus and arrived at the water taxi - a chartered water bus actually. It was really nice, as it was enclosed and heated.

The ride into San Marco Square was about 15 minutes long. When we got there we broke into small groups to tour around. Some of us shopped, some got coffee, and most of us took in the sites. The weather was clear but extremely cold. We ventured around checking out small shops and taking pictures of everything we could. We met up with the other teams; OVA, West Coast, and the rest of our “Team Jax” buddies.

After seeing the city, we all boarded our charter buses again (after making a necessary pit stop at a public restroom where it was 1 Euro to use the restroom). We then drove the 90 kilometers to Izola, Slovenia through the snow where we will spend our first night and play in our first European volleyball tournament. Everyone seems to be very excited and ready to have an awesome tour!