Wellington, NZ gymnastics competition 坐飛機去新西蘭的威靈頓參加體操比賽

gymnasticsdad (37)in #blog • 7 years ago (edited)

Friday night we flew out to Wellington for the Wellington Open. There was a huge storm over NZ which caused major flooding in big cities in the South Island such as Christchurch and Dunedin.

Flying into Wellington, the weather caused delays and when our plane was ready to land, they told the pilot to do a holding pattern for 15 minutes. This ended up being a bit bumpy and I started feeling ill. Alyssa also is not great at travelling and I could tell she was feeling the pinch even though we didn't say anything. Suddenly the plane finally landed and we both breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was drenched in sweat by this stage. It was about 7pm at night in winter so very dark and we were ready to get out of there.

My sister and niece who live in Wellington picked us up and took us to our motel. They went to look for places to eat while we unpacked and then we went out and found a nice original restaurant. A beer for me, a glass of wine for Aunty Esther, and hot chocolates for Alyssa and her cousin Amber.

While we waited for the burgers, we explored the games choices they had there and chose boggle. The tables had pencils and you could write on the table tops so it was great for boggle. Even the word 'cousin' was among one of the boards. The burgers were nice and then the girls topped off their evening with a marshmallow and chocolate ice cream sundae.

Back to the hotel and an early night on Friday. Saturday Alyssa's level was starting late at around 5pm so they had time to go see a movie. The choice was "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" which was not my cup of tea. I was keen to see "Dunkirk" but it was a lot longer and started slightly later so I had to pass that opportunity and ended up checking out Wellington's Courtenay Place and then reading a book while waiting for the movie to end. After that we went back to the motel, got ready and headed to the competition.

The Wellington Open was not as big as the previous competition I posted about. It was mainly clubs from Wellington along with some from the top of the South Island such as Blenheim and Nelson, the girls from Te Wero in Christchurch and a few random North Island clubs from cities such as Napier and Hamilton. Still, the main goals at this one were to gain experience travelling (only the second time we've taken a plane to a competition) and also to improve on previous scores this year.

First day unfortunately was all around (the total of your 4 apparatus scores) and unfortunately her floor did not go well so she finished 3rd overall despite 1st place in bars and beam.

Second day she did a lot better and managed to get her best scores of the season on vault, floor and beam.

Here's some video:

A lot of the parents noticed me recording and said nice things about her skills. Being that she's 9 and competing with up to 13 year olds, people really notice the height difference and also her routines have the highest difficulty scores so people really notice when she does skills that girls much older tend to be the only ones doing here.

Having said that, there are girls I've seen on youtube her age doing the same skills so she will always have to keep improving.

Flight back to Christchurch later on Sunday was a lot easier and now the training continues. Still to come this year, Canterbury champs, a small competition down south and also the New Zealand nationals which she has made the cut for.