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Day 10, Monday, January 17, 2005
By Cory Solomon
Early this morning we departed Innsbruck for Munich, Germany for the final day of the tour. I said all my good-byes to my wonderful friends in Innsbruck as I call this place home for much of the summer. A special thanks must go out to Peter and Gabi for arranging everything in Innsbruck. Without them it would be impossible to enjoy this wonderful mountain town so much. Thanks also to Therese Achammer for allowing us such a fun and flexible schedule in Innsbruck.
The drive to Munich was uneventful and only took a few hours to reach our hotel. While in Munich we stay at the Regatta, the host site for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Rowing. It’s a very nice place surrounded by trees and the lake that hosts all the rowing. It’s a tradition with us at Bring It to stay at the Regatta and the people that work there are wonderful to us. Basically on the January tour we are the only guests, which is a good thing on the last night of the tour. (Many thanks to Andreas and Herr Schumacher.)
After an hour, 70% of the tour took the U-Bahn into the center of Munich for sightseeing and shopping while the other 30% went to Augsburg to play the final match of the tour. We told the entire Munich group to figure out the U-Bahn system and meet us back at a restaurant at 8:00pm. I must admit that I’m so proud of all the players for their ability to master all different types of European mass transit while on tour.
Team BIP vs. Radovan and Augsburg
Our good friend, Radovan Gacic from Slovenia, now coaches Augsburg. It’s his first year in Augsburg and he brought two players from Maribor, Slovenia to join him with the team. It was nice to see all of them again. The match was more of a scrimmage as Radovan let us do whatever we wanted during all the sets. Katie Anderson played the first set with Augsburg. This was a good experience for her to play with an actual European team. The nice thing about being such good friends with the Euro coaches is that we can often control the matches, meaning we can do whatever needs to be done to allow the players the best opportunity to be placed. Both Finnish coaches were at the match and they wanted to see certain players perform in certain situations. Knowing the coaches so well allows us to do this. We played four sets and all of them were very close.
We left Augsburg and met the rest of the group as planned at Luna Rosa at 8:00pm. However, when we arrived there was a decent percentage of our girls missing. It took them over an hour to arrive as their tram was diverted by some type of accident and they needed to get off of one tram and wait for another to arrive. I was proud of them for figuring everything out. We finished the tour with a big group dinner of pizza, pasta and salad. Tim was acting as a waiter for the group, speaking Italian and really enjoying himself. It was a nice way to end the day.
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