First Week

The first week was pretty interesting. Katy and I both said that it felt like we really hadn’t left when we went back into the stadium and saw the people there again. We acclimatized pretty quickly. I think it only took a couple days to have the legs feeling pretty good and our sleep pattern got on track in only a couple days. Katy got right back to playing with her Thursday night league team again and she was excited to start playing again. On the weekend our team had training camp a couple hours away, in a place called Moe (pronounced Mo-ee). We had it Saturday and Sunday. It was quite warm on Saturday as the temperature hit around 116 in Melbourne and I think it even got a little hotter in some other places. It actually ended up being the hottest day ever on record in Melbourne. When you walked outside it was an instant sweat and the gym that we played was somewhat cool, but since most of the gyms here are not air conditioned it got pretty hot as the day went on. As you can imagine our coach took a little easier on us than planned. We were originally scheduled for a track workout, outside, for an hour, but due to the heat that was cut out of the day. Also this weekend there was the bush fires. I don’t know if you had seen on the news at all, but it was the worst fire in history here, with many people dying. Normally it gets dark here about 8:30/9:00, but at 6:00 it was almost dark because of all the smoke in the air. At 5:30 the sky was a bright orange, I’ve never seen anything like it. An hour or two later it rained and when the drops hit your skin they weren’t clear they were black with all the ash. It was interesting to go out Sunday morning and see everything covered in a black film.
On Saturday when we got to Moe we could see what looked like a big front - line of clouds - coming our way. We found out that it was the smoke from the fire. When we got to the stadium where we were training at, we could also see another cloud of smoke that look like smoke coming up from a power plant, but on a much greater scale. We found out later that this was also smoke, but from another fire.
We had practice on Saturday and Sunday but if we would have wanted to go home Saturday night we would not have been able to, due to the fires and all of the smoke around the highway.