The finals of Perpignan was exclusively an all-Slug final. After we both won in the semi’s we were SO stoked, and got treated to a nice dinner with three of the women at the club. We tried our best to learn some French with them, and we taught them some very important English words like “dude”, and “whats up dawg”.
Varta took home the bacon in a hard-faught match that definitely was one of the highlights of our trip. We both had good wins to get to the finals, and both played well. The difference in the match came down to a few plays, and who executed better on the court and Marc’s serve proved too hard to break. We got treated great at the tournament, and after the match we got 400 euros, our biggest payday of the trip! We had some wine and beer at the tournament banquet after, it was BOMB.
Turned out that our next and last tournament in Southern France started the very next morning. It was in Carnon, which is a beach city right outside of Montpellier. We got a ride to the airport from our Legionare friend Andre in his big green tank (Land Rover) and took a train to Montpellier. When we got off the train, we stumbled onto two different buses that eventually took us out onto a long peninsula that separates the mainland from the beach towns that Carnon is a part of. Before starting the travel day, we kind of starting to worry that our travel luck may have run out because we didn’t even have the address for the tennis club, but the bus dropped us off at the main bus stop at the Tourism office and to our disbelief, the courts were RIGHT next to the bus stop.
The Carnon club has 6 courts and 3 different surfaces: one really fast hard court, 3 quick courts, and 3 Gasol courts which is carpet with sand all over it. Basically its synthetic red clay. The club is in the middle of a major renovation and is filled with buzz-saws, hammers, drills, concrete pourers, big trucks, and weathered construction men from 7 in the morning until 7 in the evening. The club said we could stay there, up in the locker rooms on the second floor. The only catch is that at around 7 in the morning the cleaning ladies have to come up, but they told us we would probably we awake from the construction anyways. Turns out they were very correct, because every morning we have been violently awoken to huge banging noises. We have the routine down pretty good now though, at around 7 we pack up our sleeping pads and pillow and sonder out onto the beach, which is about 50 yards from the club, and sleep for a few hours in the beach as the sun comes up. Its actually pretty nice.
Colin scrapped out another victory in the first round against a 2/6 player. It officially meant that Colin has a winning record for the trip whooo-hoooo which was his main goal as far as the tennis goes. Groundstrokes were still all over the place, so he spent about half of the match at the net and serve and volleying.
Varta had a rough outing against a guy who used to be around top 15 in all of France back in his hay-day. The guy played very unorthodox and it was pretty hard to catch a rhythm.
The next day Colin played another 2/6 on an extremely windy day, so windy that you could practically hit it as hard as you could on one side and it would go in, and exactly the opposite on the other side. Turns out his opponent just finished school in Michigan. Colin lost pretty bad in straight sets, and officially ended his French tennis career chipping and charging and serve-and-volleying for the second part of the second set haha.
We are officially done with tennis for this leg of the trip. Colin goes home on Monday and Varta just put the finishing touches on renting a room in Paris to play tournaments for the month of September. We have just been bumming around the beaches and went out to a bar last night in Montpellier.
We told all the guys around the Carnon club that we wanna go out to the nightclubs, so they are gunna go out with us tonight! The main guy running the club, named Damaz, is super cool and took us out last night to a club called “the rum room.” Tonight were going out with Damaz, the main tennis pro here named JB, and then the top tennis player in this area who is around 120 ATP. Should be pretty fun.
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