The "Rest" Day

Two years ago, when we went to the World Youth in Porto Carras, Greece, we took a tour of Thessaloniki on our rest day.  While I really enjoyed the trip, Cameron remembers it as being quite boring and tiring.  Most of all, he really wanted to avoid riding on a bus for several hours.

This year, the tournament organizers had arranged several interesting looking excursions, but each involved at least 3 and up to 7 hours of bus rides.  Cameron declared that he was not interested, and I reluctantly agreed.

With the organized excursions ruled out, Cameron and I had a "choose your own adventure" kind of day.  We slept in as late as possible and ate a leisurely breakfast.  After the meal, we headed up the gondola to the top of the mountain.  On our previous trip to the top, our friend Jeffery told us that he wanted to play ping pong with us.  We didn't have a definite plan, but we decided to stop by their room, just in case. Fortunately we caught Jeffery and his father Wayne as they were leaving their room to go play badminton.  Turns out the weather outside was not ideal for badminton, so we took a short walk in the cool air.  After the walk, we went downstairs to the gymnasium to play ping pong.  Once there, we were joined by brother Tan and Trung Nguyen of Virginia.  We played many games of Around the World and both kids and Dads had a great time.  I'm sure Jeffery will post a full crosstable for the event as he was quite keen on tabulating everyone's score.

After ping pong, we headed back to the gondola to figure out our next plan.  We ran into Craig and his father trying to catch the next one down.  Unfortunately for them, the gondola was shutting down for an hour.  We convinced them to walk down the mountain with us.  We started off descending the main ski slope which was quite steep in places and very slick with the recent rains.  Despite a couple of slips, nobody got seriously hurt (a few bruised egos and some muddy clothes).  Eventually we made it to a flatter trail and it was actually quite beautiful.  The whole descent only took us an hour and it probably would have been much quicker if the terrain had been a bit dryer.

One of the nice features of this year's organization is that your official accreditation is also valid as a bus pass on all the city's buses.  When we reached the bottom of the hill, we hopped on a bus for the short ride into the heart of Maribor's Old City.  Maribor is a very nice small city with only 100,000 inhabitants, but it has many nice old churches and castles to look at.  The city is also part of a popular wine growing region.  Here Cameron is sampling some of the city's finest, just like his Mom would do.

One of the popular tourist spots in Maribor is known as the Old Vine.  The grape vine in the background is over 400 years old and still produces fruit.  The vine grows on a trellis which spans the entire of facade of the building behind the boys.  Each year they harvest 35 to 55 Kg of grapes from the vine and produce approximately 100 bottles of wine.  As you can imagine, these bottles are quite prized.

In town we had a little pizza and ice cream to break up the monotony of the hotel food, and then hopped on the bus for the short ride back to our room.  After the busy day, it was time for some relaxation and then studying for the next opponent.  In round 7, Cameron will face Timur Trubchaninov from Russia on board 2.  Timur already has draws against the #1 and #8 seeds and he defeated the #3 seed, so we know that this game will not be easy.