We set off on Friday for the island of Madeira to play a couple of league games. Madeira is an island not too far off the coast of Africa (It is pretty much parallel to Casablanca). Its a really nice spot. The island has too main cities, or at least two cities with volleyball teams, Funchal and Machico.
We left Friday night from Porto and flew directly into Machico which was a pleasant surprise because usually we have to fly to Lisbon first then to the island. We checked into our hotel pretty late and crashed for the night. Our hotel was pretty dope. They had a nice outdoor swimming pool, a ping pong table, a pool table, and it was located about ten feet from the ocean. The actual rooms were pretty average except for the wicked awesome view of the ocean from our balconies. The best part about the hotel was probably the buffets that they served. We ate every meal buffet style in the hotel restauraunt. The food was definitely better than the average buffet style food which was a nice change from eating the bland dishes that I usually cook up at home (actually thats a little bit of an exageration, we've been eating pretty well at home lately). The shitty part of staying there was that we never actually got around to using their games room or the swimming pool, kind of a waste. Ended up napping a whole lot or just playing cards.
Going into this weekend our team was winless so this was kind of a do or die weekend. Not too sure if we would get paid if we started the season off 0-5. We were still confident though because the teams we were about to play were also winless to date. Saturday night we drove 30 mins into Funchal to play Maritimo. Their gym is actually really nice. They play in a relatively new sporting complex. Its just too bad that their new gym was empty for our match. We came out with a pretty uneventful, aside from almost blowing a 6 point lead in the third, 3-0 victory.
Finally getting that monkey off our back by getting a win was huge confident boost for us and we came out Sunday night playing pretty well. Only problem was that it didn't last. The atmosphere was completely opposite from the night before. The gym we were playing in was super ghetto but they had a decent fan turnout. The couple guys with drums and a megaphone boosted the crowd effect considerably. We ended up blowing a huge lead in the first set, losing 26-24. We managed to recover pretty quickly though and we handled the rest of the match fairly easily winning 3-1. Post match we rushed to
the airport to catch our flight home only to find that it was delayed an hour. No surprise there, I have only ever caught one flight to any island in Portugal that was actually on time.All in all a super important weekend for us even if it was only beating a couple of bottom teams.
