Yesterday, I went to a volleyball free-play club for the first time. Honestly, I started the night really nervous; new people, the language barrier, and having to show my rusty volleyball skills off. My volleyball history consists of one season of jv my freshman year and then half a season of varsity when I was a sophomore. Aside from that, I haven’t played on any organized team, although I did play pickup once a week for a few months my junior year of college with some grad students (some of my best semester by the sea memories were on the sand court) Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The volleyball portion of my night started at 20:30. Like I mentioned before, I was nervous but luckily I was meeting my friend Abe there so that helped ease my mind. (side note: people asked if we were siblings because we both have curly red hair) We warmed up and then split up into teams to play. As the night went on, I definitely brushed the rust off my skills but at the beginning I would definitely admit to being the teams weakest link. Lucky for me (debatably if I’m being honest), people stayed behind to play more after the official finish around 2230 and I, along with five other people, played until 0100!!!! By the end, my body was def slacking. Sometimes, I would see the ball coming and knew I had to get it but I just couldn’t get my body to follow through. Thankfully, by that point we were all tired so no one cared. I would summarize that whole situation as a game of volleyball chicken. By the time we finished our final game, my team lost (although it was back-and-forth for a while until the other team was finnally able to end 2 points ahead), I was just glad I could leave to start my forty minute drive home. Even with all the forearm aches and newly acquired bruises, I’m currently trying to work out the logistics to see if it’s possible to play when I come back from my vacation. See, I have an electric car with a range of anywhere from 130-160 km (cue: anxiety) and I’ll be driving to a train station roughly 30 km away, leaving it parked until I comeback from my trip, and then coming back, I’ll have to make sure I have time to charge it before volleyball that night or else I won’t be able to comfortably make it the roughly 80 km roundtrip.
In more exciting news though, I have finished packing for Scotland and Ireland (now I’m just hoping I wont be cold!) and am getting pretty pumped about my trip. I also had to say goodbye to T today (him and his mom are leaving for their vacation to Miami and New Orleans) and I almost cried. He’ll literally only be gone for two weeks, I don’t know what my problem is. I used to be considered cold-hearted but, obviously, that’s not the case anymore.
Tash the Traveler 