Örebro and Day 2 of the Tournament

After the games yesterday, one of our Skovde teammates who lives in Orebro offered for Diane and me to stay with her in her apartment, and we gladly accepted. We stuck around the fields for a fun BBQ held for the teams who had to travel (Soder and Sundsvall), and we enjoyed steak and potato salad. Our teammate, Asa, explained that she had played for the Orebro softball team from 1995-2009 but then half the team quit, so that is why she has played with Skovde the past two years.

We went back to her place to freshen up and then she drove us into town. It was bigger than Skovde, but it still had that quaint feel. We went straight to the heart of town and saw the Orebro Castle. Crazy how towns just have castles in the middle of them! The sun was just setting so the lighting was beautiful. I definitely wished I had my nicer camera to take some photos, but my iphone did okay.

We continued to walk around town and then came to the main square. Asa said she'd take our picture and then told us to take our shoes off and go in the water! Diane and I quickly agreed and then quickly found out how cold the water was=.! It was a really cool place and good for photo ops.

We then went back to Asa's apartment and helped her make pasta salad for the next day and watched some Olympics before calling it a night.

This morning, Diane and I ate breakfast and walked to the fields to meet our team. We warmed up for the first game against Orebro. Nathalie pitched and she did a great job getting out of some tough innings. We ended up getting the W--woo hoo! Our fatigue of playing a bunch of games definitely showed in the next game, and 1 bad inning proved to be the difference as Soder handed us our fourth loss of the weekend.  Like I said in the last post, we saw a lot of good things this weekend from the team but we definitely have some things to work on this week in practice. I was really proud of the girls since many of them have not had much playing time, and they put so much effort into the games. We did a great job getting on base and scored a lot of runs, but the other teams just scored more. The ride home after the final game was fun and a few girls on the team taught us Swedish curse words, (we were bound to learn at some point, right?). Not to worry though, I can't even pronounce half of them!

When we got back to Skovde, the girls on the team were really excited to watch the handball game since Sweden was playing France in the finals. Lisa had made a reservation for us at O'Leary's, a Boston inspired sports bar. I was tempted to get the "Harvard Club Sandwich" but ended up going for a quesadilla since I've been desperate for Mexican food. Unfortunately Sweden ended up losing by 1 goal. Boo. It was still fun to get dinner with the team after a good weekend spent with my teammates.

Oh, and turns out that there is a website that keeps the league's stats! Neither Diane nor I have enough at-bats entered into the stats to crack the season leader board, but we'll be up there soon enough I predict! Diane is crushing the batting categories and I'm happy to be in the top 10 for a few offensive categories and top1-3 for pitching categories. What doesn't quite make sense is that Skovde is leading many of the offensive categories like batting average, but we don't have that many wins, making Diane and me think that we are way better than our record would indicate...hmmmm....