Sopron woke up to a freezing cold, windy morning, and so did the members of our team’s traveling delegation to get on the road through Vienna and Paris towards Bourges, the final station of the regular season of Euroleague.
Our point guard Briann january even mentioned that she has never experienced such cold weather since she had been here in Sopron. That didn't hold Autrian border control personnel back, they got on the bus leaving their booth to check our passports. They found that everything was in order, so we were able to continue our journey to Vienna airport, which would usually be crowded in times without the pandemic. However, stepping into Terminal 1 the writer of these lines thought about the hit song by Bonanza Banzai 'Everything is abandoned, no music is playing'. At the baggage desk of Air France there was the usual crowd of people waiting patiently. They randomly checked our PCR tests, from our group our head coach Dávid Gáspár had to show his fresh negative test results. There was no shortage of Hungarians at the airport. We were able to order our coffees waiting for take-off in our mother tongue, and at the gate some nice DVTK supporters wished us good luck. At least that's what we thought after they looked at our face masks with our team's logo on it and said that we should leave some titles to the DVTK girls as well.
During the flight above the clouds we were able to enjoy the soul touching effects of sunlight, but landing in France we were greeted with a heavy snowfall. Rolling towards the Charles de Gaulle airport, one of the cover photos of the Irish band U2 we were amazed by an exhibition piece of Concorde, a plane capable of doing twice the amount of sound speed, which was stretching boundaries in its time, just like we do day by day.
At 3 pm we were already getting comfortable on the bus equipped with footrest, after our kind driver coped with the frozen door. We were facing four more hours by bus to the venue of the bubble, one of which we spent on the outskirts of Paris. We were used to traveling for a long time, but it felt good to arrive to Bourges early in the evening, and end the day with a nice dinner.
We will start the day with a coronavirus test on Sunday morning, and then we throw ourselves into Le Prado, an arena with the capacity of 5000, of which the locals are very proud. Kind of like we do on our second home, Novomatic Aréna. However, we have to fight our well-known rivals here!