Friday 4th April 2014
It was a day of learning, driving and training today as our attention shifts to getting ready for the Easter Bowl U18 ITF Grade B1 which starts on Monday.
This morning we had breakfast, packed up and left the hotel at 8.30am to go to the tournament site so that we could watch some of the ¼ final matches. We wanted to watch Kaitlyn McCarthy play Kelly Chen so that we could learn from yesterday’s match and also check out some of the other girls who might be playing next week in Indian Wells.
At around 12pm we left Carson for the 2 and a half hour drive through the mountains to Indian Wells and even though everyone talks about Indian Wells being in the middle of the desert I didn’t quite realise that it actually would be!! We saw some amazing scenery as we drove from the city, through the mountains, past a huge wind farm, along some sand blown roads and into a town surrounded by mountains!
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The drive from LA to Indian Wells
When we arrived we met up with Katie’s mum, Nicki, who is joining us for the week so we’re really looking forward to some home cooked meals!
At 5pm we headed over to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden which is less than a mile from where we are staying, but we were told straight away that there were no courts available for practice this evening. I’m not one to easily take no for an answer so we went into the gym to warm up and then at 5.45pm I managed to sweet talk a member into letting us use one of the courts he had booked! I did say that we were only looking to practice for 20-30 minutes but an hour and a half later, with the sun setting behind the mountains, we were still on the court training!
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Not a bad view from court 1
After the session we went back into the gym to cool down and stretch out before heading back to the house at just before 8pm for a lovely home cooked dinner.
