The Kentucky volleyball team is on a two-week trip to Europe as a part of the Bring It program. The Wildcats will have the opportunity to play seven matches against teams ranging from European professionals to junior national teams while experiencing the culture of five different countries. UK volleyball manager Ryan Suckow is sending in photos, blog entries, and video about their experiences while in Europe.
Hey Wildcat Fans and Family,
We are spending our last evening here in Maribor, Slovenia after a very eventful and rain-free day. The day started with breakfast at the hotel, and then our match, also in the hotel, against the Slovenian National Team. The Cats played well in the second and fourth sets, but could not pull out the fifth set, and they lost their second match of the trip.
After a little break, the team got ready and we took a chairlift all the way up the mountain behind our hotel to eat lunch. We had some salad, bread, sausage, fruit and cucumber, which was all delicious. We got some great pictures up at the top of the mountain and then it was time to come down the hill. As you can tell from our pictures, coming down the hill was a lot more fun than going up. We took these little cars down a track with just a seatbelt and a lever that went in between your legs to either accelerate you or make you slow down. We had so much fun the first time that we took the chairlift all the way up again just to come back down. Some even went three times. After the first time, most of the team decided to go full acceleration all the way down the hill and race down as fast as they could. Everyone had a blast, especially Coach Skinner who timed himself down the hill.
After spending a little more downtime in the hotel, we took off for downtown Maribor to go to the local winery (we ended up going here instead of the vineyard) called Vinag. We got to tour their wine cellars, which were humongous. They had both old style wooden barrels as well as the stainless steel barrels which are healthier to use. The woman who took us on the tour told us many great facts about wine and specifically their cellar. They produce a couple million gallons of wine per year. They even have a special cellar that was locked up that we could not get into that had 150,000 bottles of special and old wines, with one dating all the way back to the 1940s, just after WWII. The oldest bottle cost over 4,000 Euros.
After that, we headed back to the hotel for dinner to unwind for the evening before getting back on the road on our way to Pula, Croatia. We leave the hotel tomorrow at 8:30 in the morning. The trip will take about four hours. Once we get there, we will go sightseeing and after that, I will come right back here to tell you all about it. Thanks for checking in with us, we miss you all, and hope everything is going well back home. Check back in tomorrow for more updates on the UK Volleyball European Tour.
