After Ian woke up, the three of us piled into the car and headed to the beach. Parking seems to be a bit nuts down here. Even though it's Friday there's tons of people here looking for spots. We found a few places but they were all 2 hour lots and we're planning on being here for a while. I found a lot with 10 hour parking and as luck would have it, someone was pulling out right as I pulled up. I put on my blinker all ready to park when a girl came driving around from the other aisle with a sad story about how she's been waiting for someone to pull out for 30 minutes. I let her have the spot. Am I too nice? Good karma points coming my way hopefully.
Eventually we went to a 2 hour lot and I just had to come back and feed the meter later in the day. Time to walk to the beach! It's a little overcast right now, but shortly it's going to be blue skies.
The view from the pier looking south. You can see the stage court really well.
The Manhattan Beach Open, presented by Smart (the Smart car makers).
No bleachers here. Everyone can get as close as they want while sitting on the sand.
Our first stop of the day was the merchandise tent. What kind of goodies can we find here?
T was interested in some shirts.
Eventually we ended up getting Ian a few onsies for $15 each.
Walking through all the sponsors tents, we sampled a few treats. McDonalds was giving samples of their Horchata frappe. another tent was giving out Greek yogurt ice cream bars which were great on a hot day, add in some granola bars, 5 hour energy, bottles of water, and you could eat down here all day for free.
The Paul Mitchell tent was giving haircuts for $15 and donating the money to charity.
And Oberto was giving away packs of beef jerky! Delicious!
Let's check out the leader board and see what games we want to hit.
Ready to have a fun day.
We're going to start on the featured girls court. Ian was just a little too short to see over the barrier. He was trying hard though.
Instead he sat and crawled all over the towels while we watched the game.
It's amazing what these girls can dive and get to.
Check out the form as Emily Day goes up for a spike. Arched back, arm bent so much it looks uncomfortable, and knees bent. She's ready to explode on the ball.
Contrast that to her form when she's going up for a placement shot. If you can read the difference in the body language, you can get a jump on where the ball might be going.
Ian was just hanging out beside the barrier in the shade. His new favorite food seems to be Cheerios. He's picking up as many as he can from Theresa's hand.
Then shoving them in his mouth. Theresa had brought the Cheerios for her, but Ian ended up eating most of them.
In the end, Summer Ross and Emily day won the match in two entertaining games.
I've found sand!
Next we went to the men's featured court.
There we watched Stafford Slick and his partner Adrian Carambula.
Adrian has an amazing sky ball serve that was definitely proving difficult to handle. He's send this serve so high in the air and about 6 feet out of bounds, but because he got so much spin on it plus with a little help from the ocean breeze, it would come back into play. Impressive.
He also had really good court vision and sent so many balls over on the second hit for points. I always appreciate a smart player.
Oh boy... Stafford Slick getting a set right on the net with no blockers.
That's going to be bad news. He put it down with authority.
All to soon it was time to head back to the car. Luckily for us, the tournament continues tomorrow and Sunday! We'll be back tomorrow!
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