Phew!

To say the last 48 hours have been a little crazy would be putting it nicely.  But here I am sitting at the airport waiting for the first of my 3 flights!  I am always pretty busy prior to leaving for one of these trips but this time around takes the cake for sure.  Between work (I had to travel to Connecticut for the day yesterday) and getting ready for settlement on the house I haven't had a whole lot of time for anything else, including packing and sleep. You would think that this being my 5th tournament I'd have the packing thing down to a science.  Not so much.  I always bring way too much stuff and this time is no exception.   And a word of advice for any of my readers - don't try to travel 2 weeks before you settle on a new house.  The mortgage company wants everything but my left arm so I've been going crazy trying to get all of their required documentation.  But I think just about everything got done so as long as I didn't forget anything while packing I should be good to go!

I haven't really posted much about the tournament itself so I figured I'd use this time to do so.  As I mentioned before, I'm going to the u18 Women's World Championship A Pool in Budapest, Hungry.  This is the top level IIHF tournament this year aside from the Olympics.  The teams participating include the USA, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Japan, Russia and Hungry.  The teams are split into two pools that will play a round robin.  The top team from each pool will receive a bye directly to the semi's.  Teams in 2nd and 3rd place will battle it out in the quarterfinals.  The 4th place team in each pool will play a 3 game series to try to earn the right to stay in the top division and the loser will be dropped to Division 1 next year.   While the USA and Canada are expected to dominate the competition, the rest of the teams should be pretty tightly matched so I expect a lot of close games.  Here is a link to the official tournament site: http://www.iihf.com/competition/365/statistics.html

Well it is almost time to board flight #1 to head to Washington Dulles.  Big thank you goes out to my Aunt Denise and Uncle Bob for driving me to the airport earlier today.  Also, for my friends that travel frequently, you have to get pre-tsa.  It easily saved me 30 minutes through security.  It was well worth every penny.  I have a short layover in Washington then comes the long flight over to Frankfurt.  Once in Frankfurt I have a 4 1/2 hour layover then it is on to Budapest!  Looking forward to getting some sleep on the plane and getting this journey started!