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Off The Hook Melanie Behrens Off The Hook Archives The tennis eventTennis is a great sport and I have been playing for more than 35 years. Unlike golf, when I step onto the court I am pretty sure what is going to happen. You may remember I wrote about golf last week and all its uncertainties. Tennis is a good workout in a short period of time. I now have many more aches and pains, but I love it. Last week, the USTA event for men was at Kings Island and a group of my tennis friends invited me to go along for a day trip. It actually ended well, but we had a very rough start. Because of the series of events, some of my friends only wanted me to use their first names (just look at the picture for full disclosure on the names). We met at Janet’s house. Janet has some street parking changes in front of her house involving tickets, so we decided to park in her driveway. There were five of us including Janet and Lynn and Nell who pulled into her driveway on one side. Then she realized we needed to be on the other side, so all the cars were moved and my car was squeezed in. It was a 10 minute event jockeying the cars and we were on what we thought was a fairly tight schedule. There was lots of laughing at the ridiculous situation. We were waiting for Mary to pick us up. She hadn’t stopped to get gas first because she didn’t want to hold up the trip, but she needed gas to get to Kings Island. We’ll deal with that in a moment. Janet bought the tickets and they were on her credit card. To pick them up she was going to need her driver’s license and credit card. As we finally drove away, just about one mile from her house, Janet discovered that she had neither of those items. So we went back to Janet’s house to try and retrieve them from some pocket or purse or cooler where she may have left them. It seems Janet doesn’t carry a purse. The group had a suggestion for her at this point — you need to carry a purse, Janet. She searched all of those places, but couldn’t find them. Janet grabbed her social security card and other credit cards, hoping they would work (it did) and we were on our way about an half hour late! We only made it to Milford Center where we had to stop for gas. I wondered why we were on Rt. 4, because I always use Rt. 38 to go to Cincinnati. I decided to be quiet because I was only a passenger. Others in the car noticed it too and soon we were looking for a cut over to Rt. 38. What do women do who don’t have a GPS? They call husbands (they are good for some things). It took two of them to get the info we needed and soon we were headed south on I-71. About 10 minutes from our destination, we came to a stop and traffic was backed up for at least 10 miles. We crept along for 25 minutes (now we are an hour late). Finally we passed this tiny area of construction where, can you believe, nothing was going on, and made our way to the tennis tournament at Kings Island. We found our seats, which were under a nice canopy, and were headed down the row when a woman in front of me said “Stop, Stop.” I looked down to see that the fanny pack I have on in front of me has caught the girl’s hair in the zipper pull and it is about 5 minutes of wailing and turning to try and get her hair out of that zipper. Everyone behind is saying, “Sit down, we can’t see.” I said, “Can you believe this?” Mary answered, “It fits with the day we’ve had already!” It was hot, but we were able to watch number one seed Rafael Nadal play and finally win after dropping the first set to his French opponent. As we started our trek home in the evening, we wondered what was in store for us. The answer is — nothing out of the ordinary! And we were happy about that. It was a great day, one with many laughs and lots of good memories. ––– Interesting fact: The current month of August has five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays. This only occurs once every 823 years! ––– If you missed last week’s golf column, just go to marysvillejt.com click on Off the Hook, then on archives. (Melanie Behrens - melb@imetweb.net) |
