July 25, 2001
Tuesday, July 24
By Jessica Dickerson #3
The first day of our trip was filled with excitement! I think I can safely say that everyone going was definitely filled with excitement when we arrived at the airport. You could definitely sense the excitement in our assistant coach, Bond. He was acting a bit quirky, even for himself.
As I boarded the plane, I was overcome with joy to discover that I would be traveling on a very long flight sitting between all of the staff members that were coming along. Luckily, even though they are old, they are pretty cool.
Anyway, as the flight progressed strange things began to happen. Shelton, our head coach, was unable to sleep due to the painfully annoying cries of a toddler seated in front of him. Melissa Jenkins was the object of several photographs due to her unique and very humorous fashion statement consisting of headphones, a neck pillow, and a blindfold. However, the most amusing part of the flight was observing Shannon Tuttle, assistant coach, slowly get “cabin fever” as she began to laugh for no apparent reason and continuously lose in her game of electronic solitaire. The height of her madness was shown when she, not one of the players, was yelled at for being too loud and waking up another passenger on the plane.
While all of this was taking place, I was busy being occupied by the inflight entertainment. I enjoyed several movies as well as some “bell bottom” jams from the 70’s. The flight was definitely an interesting one.
Landing in Paris was a unique experience for me. I had never been to the Paris airport and was surprised to find it so busy. (don’t ask me why, I mean, it is Paris!) Anyway, we finally all made it to the gate when we discovered that one of us had misplaced our ticket, but Bond came to the rescue and help to solve that problem so we all made it safely onto the flight to Hamburg.
We are now on our way to meet Dori and Maja’s Mom at the Hamburg airport. Dori is arriving from Brussels, where she attended summer school for the past few months. Other than Brad’s (our trainer) bag turning up missing, our travels went well.
From here our adventures will begin.
