Wednesday 2nd – Thursday 3rd February 2011
After meeting up with Beth Askew, Devan McCluskey and Farah Abdel-Aziz at 7pm at Heathrow airport we checked in and made our way through security without any hitches. Check In – Clear – Beth’s been a bit worried as she was told that U16’s don’t need a Visa for Kenya but everyone else had one so she was on edge the whole way! After a quick bite to eat we boarded our Virgin Flight to Nairobi. It’s always a nice to travel with one of the bigger airlines and even though Virgin’s not the best airline in the world it’s in my top 5 and it is British!
The flight was ok except we ended up getting dinner at around 10.30pm and then all the lights came back on at 4am as it was 7am local time and they wanted to feed us breakfast. We all managed a bit of sleep and I got to watch “127 hours” which I thought was pretty good, bit graphic in the middle when he’s chopping his arm off but all good!
We landed in Nairobi at 8.40am, luckily we all got through security and Beth did make it without having to pay despite having to wait twice as long in a separate queue! We got the bags and checked in for our internal flight to Mombasa. I was really looking forward to seeing Kenya from the air and despite not seeing any wildlife the views were pretty amazing (once the cloud had cleared!)
Kenya from the window of our Nairobi - Mombasa flight
We were met by Joe, a tennis coach from Nairobi whose car was covered in Arsenal flags, posters and cushions, and he took us on a direct but frantic drive across town to our Hotel. After checking in and sorting out the rooms we walked the short 5 minute walk to the club.The club was much nicer than expected with a huge cricket pitch and nice clubhouse, the courts however were pretty rough! They are very old, very slow and bouncy and are made in blocks so as they’ve got older the blocks have moved and now there are big cracks on almost every line – at least you know if it’s on the line! We trained for an hour and a half to try and get a bit of a feel for the courts, to get used to the 30+ degree heat and to try and get the long journey out of our system. The first session at a new venue is never going to be great and the girls did a good job of accepting their tiredness and working hard for the whole session even though it was still very hot and humid. It was then a good stretch out, a walk back to the hotel, dinner and an early night for a good nights sleep – well, for some of us anyway . . .
