Greetings from Saltzgitter. After what turned out to be a challenging travel day, we have all finally made it to this tiny town in the northern part of Germany. You know what they saw about the best laid plans...

The day began pretty early for many of us, as we left from all over Canada and the US and made our way to Toronto, to catch the 5:30 flight to Frankfurt. For some of us, it began with cancelled flights to Toronto... It was quite chaotic in Toronto as our staff tried to find out which flights our missing players might be on. Air Canada helped us out by holding onto the plane tickets of the players who were late and then making sure they got onto a later flight.

The flight was pretty calm and we arrived in Frankfurt at about 7 am, which is six hours ahead of the time in Toronto. We met Cassie Turner, who had flown driectly from Boston, but we were still missing 4 players. Our flight to Hannover, which was supposed to be a 35 minute flight, turned out to be a three and a half hour adventure.

A small snowstorm hit Hannover just before we were supposed to land, so while they were working to clean off the runway, we circled around Hannover. Most of us used this time to sleep, at least until the pilot told us they had closed the airport and that we were flying to Bremer to land. They finally re-opened the Hannover airport and we were able to land, making us 2.5 hours late. We added another player to our group, as Alison Edgar joined us.

As if the travelling wasn´t already difficult enough, Charline Labonté and Heather Logan’s hockey equipment didn´t arrive . When we went to cargo to pick up the equipment that had been sent ahead of us, they couldn´t find that either! What to do... we got on our bus, left for Salzgitter and arrived at our hotel about an hour later. After checking in (our hotel is really nice) we had an amazing lunch. We were so hungry, but our lost cargo was supposed to be on its way to the rink so we had to eat light, since we were hoping to get our practice in.

We went to the rink to wait for our equipment. We also heard from Andreas, our host, that our last three players had arrived, along with Heather´s equipment and some of our parents. In the end we couldn´t practice but we set the room up as best we could, played a little hacky sac while we waited for the bus to take us back to the hotel. We arrived back at the hotel to find the last of our team had arrived. We had some free time, figured out how to use the computer (everything is in German) had a great supper. The coaches told us we needed to stay up until at least 8 pm but I think most of us were in bed before then.

We are a tired bunch, but very excited about having our team all back together. All of our equipment has finally arrived so practice tommorrow is a go. Wake up is early, 6 am, but we can´t wait to get on the ice and begin getting ready for the tournament. That´s it from Saltzgitter for today... except for... GO CANADA GO!