End of Practice...

Well, the practice rounds are over… All of the US team seem to be ready for the start of the World Championship tomorrow morning… Round 1 is from 9-1, and Round 2 is from 3-7… The US team looks pretty good, and although the reigning World Champ Treger has been putting up some very good practice flights, so have our guys… Kagan is a former World Champion, and Sanborn holds quite a few records, and both have been putting up some very good practice flights… Nick seemed to be getting things sorted out today, and I’m expecting him to put up good flights in the next few days… The Tyson team also has been getting ready, and it is going to be fun to watch them against the other juniors…

We had the team managers meeting today, and took care of a few details, and then back to practice until the opening ceremony that started around 6… Since my bag finally got in, everyone had their shirts to wear… Thanks again to Cooper Tire for helping sponsor the team, and the shirts looked great with the US flag with an F1D over it, and the AMA, FAI, and Cooper logos on the back and Lakehurst Hanger #1 and ECIM on the sleeves… Had a few comments on how nice the shirts were, and a few noticed the sponsor logo…

The opening ceremony consisted of a few speeches from local officials welcoming the participants, and then the country signs were brought out and then local dancers performed Serbian dances in costume… Then everyone got a few pictures taken, and back in for a bit more practice before we got pushed out to dinner…

It was probably the longest day so far (other than the mess during my trip over…) but since it wasn’t as hot outside (only high 80’s today… much better than 100+ the past few days… our driver told us today that Tuesday was 41C… 105…) and inside it was almost tolerable… Still pretty bad, and you sweat constantly, but either I’m just getting used to it or don’t care anymore… My cold seems to be under control with the help of the Coldrex (stuff works pretty well…) and since I really didn’t want to take another excursion into the wilderness of Belgrade back to what they call a pharmacy to get enough to last the rest of the week, I got one of the drivers to pick some up for me during the day… 12 capsules per pack, which would be over $10 in the US, was 250 dinar here… Currency conversion is really easy… move the decimal two places to the left… yeah, everything in Belgrade is cheap… but then again I don’t think there are too many knocking down the doors to move here…

Now time to clean up and watch a bit of Olympic coverage on what I think is a German channel… they actually have great coverage, and you get to see all kinds of events as opposed to just the few that either the US should do good in or events that get good ratings… Last night they had field events on and it was the first time that I ever saw the women’s hammer throw and shot put along with the men… It runs all day long on one of the channels… and what do you know, I just got to see Bolt’s 200M win… saw the 100M win the other day… guess I didn’t miss as much as I thought I would…

I’ll be trying to post on Twitter the next few days as much as I can on the results… There are only a few WiFi connections in the hall, and since my international data plan doesn’t work in Belgrade (surprise there…) sometimes it takes a while to get one of the connections… But at the least I’ll be able to summarize things when I get back to the hotel…