On Friday I had a very special visitor stop in to see me for the day! Haleigh, who is currently playing hockey in Berlin, was on her was to Bern for the weekend stopped in Villingen for a quick visit. She was supposed to arrive at 8am on the night train but an incident in Offenburg allowed her to take a little detour to Freiburg and back before she could board the train to Villingen. By incident I mean the train was too long for the platform and she was at the end of the train so she couldn’t get off! She was standing at the door waiting for it to open when the train just started moving again! Needless to say I was happy to get another 2 hours of sleep and Haleigh got a beautiful tour of Schwarzwald through the Black Forest. Once she finally arrived we embarked on the walking tour of Villingen and I took her to all the hot spots that I knew in the town. After an afternoon with bratwurst and gluhwein at our sponsoring event in town we took the schnell bus to Schwennigen to check out the Christmas Market and the hockey store.
Mmm, Gluhwein!
We eventually returned home and Haleigh made me this very tasty meal of kartoffele pasta with egg, magi seasoning and applesauce. The perfect pre-game meal and stick to your ribs meal after the long day of walking we did around the town! The next morning she had to leave for Bern but I was so happy that she popped in for a quick visit.....even if it was less than 24 hours!
After I left Haleigh at the train station we departed for our afternoon game in Heidelberg. We arrived at the gym and I was very surprised by the surroundings.....
Our locker room!
I have never seen so much graffiti in my life. The walls of the building were covered in it, and the inside of the change rooms were also covered. Every possible wall in the vicinity of the gym had graffiti on it sometimes even the ground did. Now to the game which we won 3-0 in about 65 minutes putting our team at 8-0 and in sole possession of first place going into the final week of league before Christmas!
The game started off a little shaky for us as once again we didn’t know much about our opponent. But after the honeymoon period was over we were able to build a big lead thanks to our strong serving. We let our lead slip away a little bit and they were able to get a little too close for comfort but we were eventually able to finish them off with the final score being 25-19.
Game 2 was not our strongest game as we struggled passing and putting the ball away. Heidelberg did a pretty good job of digging our straight cross court attacks and we were struggling finding other ways to score. But again thanks in part to a couple of serving runs we were able to come back and win the second game 25-19.
You could see in game 3 that we just wanted to finish the match and head back to Villingen. We played with more purpose and were much better through the early part of the game. But again we struggled a bit to close out the match and let Heidelberg feed off of a few good plays and some real stinkers from us. They were able to get close but we eventually finished them off winning 25-22 in the third.
We were exceptionally happy to have won so fast as we were hoping to get back to Villingen to watch a bit of the Men’s basketball game. It was their biggest game of the season and turn out it was also their best game of the season too. We showed up at the start of the fourth quarter and they were up by 5 or so. They went on a tear with 3’s pushing their lead to over 15 points and the other team was never able to recover. The fans were crazy, so intense that there was almost a fight between the opposing fans and the Schwenningen faithful. There was a lot of screaming, yelling and finger pointing.....at one point the referees had to stop the game because the fans were getting so out of control.
Celebrating the basketball victory and ours!
It was a very busy two days and I was ready to head home for a good night’s sleep because we had a big day coming up on Sunday..........baking Christmas cookies!!
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