Picky and Healthy

Before my little hiatus I was heading to Cincinatti, OH. For a tennis tournament. Shocking, no?

After three amazing days I have to say that Cincinatti is pretty much the greatest tournament ever! Check out all the amazing things we got to do.

I drove to my friend Ashley’s house in Pennsylvania

And then we went through West Virgina

(it’s wild AND wonderful)

to Ohio

We started our journey at Sheetz, a kind of 7-11-like gas station and convenience store. With breakfast.

When we got to Ohio we settled into our amazingly cheap and clean hotel which was literally a five minute drive from the tournament site. Then we went to Skyline for Cincinnati chili.

Amazing. Cheap. Heart attack waiting to happen. But amazing.

And then we went for our first night of tennis.

On Thursday we headed back to the site for a full day and night of tennis.

One of the really cool things about the tournament was that they posted the practice schedules.

Which meant we got to see guys like Andy Murray

and Rafa Nadal

practicing.

While we were watching Rafa practice my friend got a phone call. She had entered to win to do the coin toss on center court and she won!! Luckily she got to bring a friend so we immediately headed over to learn what we needed to do.

Our new BFF Dale from Western and Southern Financial Group taught Ashley how to flip the coin

and then we got to go courtside

where we proceeded to call everyone we had ever met!

We also go to meet Brad Gilbert, former coach of Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, and Andy Murray and now a commentator for ESPN2

Then it came time to do the coin toss. We spent a while talking to the chair umpire,

who was super nice, and then the players came out.

Ashley flipped the coin

and it was my job to pick it up

Luckily there is also video of this momentous occasion

And then we got our picture taken with Ernests Gulbis and Andy Murray.

Once we finished the coin toss we got to sit courtside to watch the match!

Since we were sitting in the photographer’s pit we made friends with one of the pros and he let us try out his fancy camera!

In the end Murray won and we were kicked out and forced to go back to our cheap seats.

But the experience was amazing.

And then we watched more tennis.

The nice thing about going to a tournament like Cincinnati is that it’s small so you can get so close to the practices (like you saw above) and pretty much everything.

Like the TV commentators

and their sexy shorts.

And Ashley got to have a Beatles moment with Andy Roddick

Plus she got two autographs from Rafa

It wouldn’t be right for me to leave Roger Federer out of this post.

The greatest thing about Mason, OH (the tournament wasn’t actually it Cincinnati, it was in the suburb of Mason) was Graeter’s ice cream.

Seriously the best ice cream I’ve ever had. We went three times. We were only there for 3 days.

That includes one ice cream for breakfast trip on the day we left. See my blueberry ice cream with pecans and whip cream and Ashley’s peach ice cream with whip cream.

A-freaking-mazing.

Overall we had a great time and I made a great friend in Ashley!