The State Wars Blog, Day 1.5

(Day one recap, followed by the morning report)

Ok, here goes... We haven't blogged since our trip to Canada (which was a real hoot, by the way), so we thought we would give it a shot here at State Wars.

First off, what is State Wars: State Wars (www.statewarsrollerhockey.com) is a roller hockey tournament in which each state that participates creates teams based on birth years. Zac tried out in Cincinnati for the 1996 birth year team and was selected to participate! Which means, we travelled to Chicago (just outside it, actually, in Darien, Ill.) for a week of tournaments against other states 1996 aged kids!

Zac, Kierstyn and I departed for our hotel in Westmont, Ill (4 miles from the rink) on Sunday afternoon. Elisha and Kayla will be arriving late on Monday. Being that hard worker that she is, she needed to squeeze one more day in to make sure the fine folks at her workplace get paid! We arrived around 5PM Central time, checked in, found the pool location, then headed to the rink to check out the venue.

We met up with Coach McFarland so that Zac could pick up his uniform. They each get a home and away jersey, and roller hockey pants. The kids got to pick their own number (Zac, as you see, is 77; as he explains it, "7 is lucky, so why not double up, plus, 7 is the Lord's number"). Kierstyn posed with him. He is pleased to have jerseys now with his name on them.

The rink is quite an impressive place. They have an indoor soccer field, and 4 ice rinks. They ran into trouble during the first week, because they put the sports court floor down over the ice on one rink and humidity took its toll. They had to move most of those games to a rink an hour away, and that really put some families in turmoil. They have that problem solved (or so we are told) as they melted one rink, and moved the flooring over there during the day yesterday. We should (thankfully) have all of our games in the Darien Sportsplex.

Well, we grabbed some dinner, and headed back to the hotel. Long day of traveling and excitement behind us, the kids swam for a bit, then we called it a night.

Central time got us up early, but the Clubhouse Inn and Suites, along with complimentary wireless Internet, also has a nice free breakfast buffet. We got our fill. Kids are getting ready, I'm blogging, and we are going to go exploring before our first game tonight.

Zac plays the first game at 3:50PM Central against Vermont, and then no more games until tomorrow. I plan on posting via Twitter (follow me on as #jneumeier on Twitter.com) and facebook all of the game updates, with daily blog recaps. We'll pretend that people are actually following and reading!

Thanks for reading, and thanks to those that sent Zac encouraging comments!