2015 Volleyball Tour Blog London-Paris-Barcelona Tour – Day 1 London

2015 Volleyball Tour Blog London-Paris-Barcelona Tour  – Day 1 London.

 We arrived to London Heathrow (one of the worlds largest and busiest airports).  We have 64 people in the group, they are arriving from across the USA into Heathrow on 12 different flights at 12 different times into 4 different terminals.  The first thought in my mind is CRAZYNESS…..  To make matters more crazy…. Several of the departure cities were having weather events that caused the flights to be delayed for up to almost 2 hours.  John was going from terminal to terminal collecting the players as they arrived…  and bringing them to Terminal 3.
Once everyone arrived... our motor coaches  picked us up and transported us to the hotel.  The people who arrived before 11:30 went on the first motor coach the people who arrived after 11:30 went on the 2nd motor coach.  It took about 60 minutes to drive into London.  Most of us slept during the drive into London.   The hotel had everything ready for our group and we quickly got checked into our Hotel. (normal check in was not until 2pm but we were able to check in early) The Hotel is nicer than I expected and is about 50 meters from the TUBE stop (Metro) which will make it easy to get anywhere we want to go…

The first group to arrive had about 3-4 hours before we had to go to our group meeting and to volleyball so we shower and a nap were in order.  The 2nd group had only about 1 hour before we had to go to practice.

At about 4:00pm we met to the gym everyone was eager to get onto the court.  The school gym was a large one court gym. They had a smaller one court "little gym" where we could scrimmage the local team while the others ran drills.

Coach Chris quickly got the group organized and doing some ball handling drills and the players got back into the swing of volleyball.  We were divided into 4 teams of  about 8-9 players (which meant everyone played a lot).  We were divided into teams based upon our ages and by the positions that we played.  It was good to get onto the court and play and as one would expect it took a while for the players to get use to each other.  

Following our practice and games we took the Metro back home … back into the heart of London which did not take nearly as long to get the gym.  We arrived home about 8:30pm had dinner and went to bed… it had been a long day… traveling from the USA to LONDON…. Experiencing the London traffic at rush hour… and playing volleyball … yes indeed … it has been a long day      

Tomorrows schedule will be a walking tour and the hop on hop off city tour…