Norway

On Thursday October 30th, we left for Norway to play in the Nordic Cup Championship. There are 2 pools of 4 teams and then our pool which only had 3 teams in it.
To qualify for the finals in Finland you needed to win your pool plus there was one wild card spot for the second place team with the best record. We first got on a train in Middelfart and went to the Copenhagen airport.
We flew from Copenhagen to Bergen, Norway, which was a beautiful flight. Coming into Bergen all you could see was water and mountains. Next we rented cars and drove for about 3 hours to Fjorde.
It is much different then Denmark which is very flat. I almost got sick the roads were so windy and moutainous. About two hours into the drive we had to take a half hour ferry ride to go another island
After the 12 hour travel day of trains, planes, automobiles and even boats, we finally arrived at our hotel. The first thing you notice about Fjorde is that it is completely surrounded by mountains, much like Banff. The sun never directly hit the ground in the city while we were there. It was a very self contained city. Impressive to say the least. We were greated with dinner at the hotel restaurant. A succulent seafood buffet, that we soon realized would be home to all our meals.

I really started getting used to 3 all you can eat meals a day and even weighing in when i got home i was up about 6 pounds!

After our meal we checked out the facilities and watched the team we would be playing practice a little bit. They looked pretty good!
We had a good night sleep and practice and it was game time. We played the home team Fjorde in the first match. An hour before the match people started showing up with pots, pans and drums. The feeling in the gym was electric, if thought there were maybe 100 people in the stands. Fjorde's starting setter was injured so they had their backup in and their offense was pretty slow. We capitalized on lotsa blocking opportunities and won 3-0 quite handly.

The next day we play played Nyborg. They had beaten Fjorde 3-0 the week before so we knew that it would be a much tighter match. I personally started off the match on fire. I had 8 kills on my first 8 attempts. We won the first set 32-30 in quite the battle. Nyborg rebounded and won the next two sets 25-22 and 25-23, the fourth set with our backs against the wall we took 25-23 which lead us to the 5th set. Feeling fired up we came out ready to take the match, unfortunatly we didn't get off to a great start...or really finish! We struggled early with passing and then Nyborg was relentless in their defence. We lost the 5th set 15-6 in a disapointing way.
However since we lost extremely close we were waiting to see if we qualified in the wild card spot. It wasn't until we reached home the next day that we heard that we had qualified so we now head to Finland in January to compete in the finals.