About four weeks ago now, I embarked on a month-long trip to Canada for four tournaments – two $25ks and two challengers. This is the first of a two-part blog about my trip which involved some of the roughest travel days I’ve ever experienced…

It took Giles and I 18 straight hours of travelling to get from my house in London to Quebec City for week one.

At 6am on Sunday morning, we left my house to embark on this mammoth journey to Canada, but luckily the first part of the journey was straightforward because my girlfriend, Vic, was kind enough to act as our chauffeur for the morning and drove us to Heathrow. The rest of our day, however, was a massive grind, and I think this journey broke my personal record for the longest amount of time I’ve spent continuously travelling – once we got to Heathrow, we had a 7 hour flight to Montreal followed by a 3 hour bus journey to Quebec City.

Travel days are part and parcel of the life of a tennis player though, but that doesn’t mean they get any easier or less boring over time. One question I’m sure a lot of people would ask us on big travel days like this is, “what do you guys do all day?” And that would be a great question.

I watched a mixture of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’, ‘Better Call Saul’, and ‘Loki’, while also doing some sudokus and crosswords. Giles binged teen drama ‘Gossip Girl’. Make of all that what you will.

Eventually though we did make it to Quebec where we went straight from the bus station to the tennis club to hit some balls at about 7 or 8pm. Now, I would say we were seeing the tennis ball like a pea during the hit, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say we were seeing it like a grain of rice… It was not the best hit I’ve had in my career, that’s for sure.

After getting to the hotel and having dinner, Giles and I fell straight asleep at about 9:30 once our heads hit the pillow in the room. Thanks to the jet lag though, we were up again at 5:30am ready to attack the day and the rest of the week.

If the previous day’s practice could be described as a shambles, then there are few words to express the state of our practice on Monday morning. We had a court booked for an hour, but after 15 minutes two of the guys playing qualies that day came over and said that they were told they could kick us off the court so that they could warm up for their matches. Brilliant.

Usually, the club we were playing at has six courts, but for the tournament one of the courts had a stand on it for spectators, and another court had the net taken out and a load of chairs put on it. 

Can you guess which court we spent the next 45 minutes hitting on…

That’s right, Giles and I moved half of the chairs from the second spectator court to make a makeshift net for us to hit over. We hardly missed a ball!

On top of this, towards the end of our hit, we got down onto the floor of the courts to survey them and we found that there were slight bumps in certain areas, so we spent the next few hours plotting where we were going to serve to and hit to in our matches in order to get the worst possible bounces…

Apart from that though, this $25k felt like a Challenger with the way that it was organised. The transport was great; the gym was great; the people running the event were super friendly; there were snacks and drinks available for free for players; and there were a couple hundred spectators watching the matches in the evenings. I wish all tournaments of this level put in the same effort.

I had one afternoon off in the week and decided to get in an Uber to explore Old Quebec City. I don’t really have anything interesting to say about my excursion but it was pretty cool and I’d recommend anyone travelling to Quebec to give it a visit. I’m sure there are exciting things to do there too, but I definitely didn’t find them. Enjoy these pictures I took though that show how lovely it is there.

Oh, Charlie also eventually turned up to Quebec after deciding to travel on his own at a completely different time to Giles and I, and we ended up making the doubles final 🙂. Charlie said the highlight of his week was playing doubles with me and definitely not winning his first $25k singles title…

After Quebec City the next tournament was in Edmonton, Alberta which is on the opposite side of the country. I didn’t realise quite how big Canada was until we were looking at travel options and decided to see how long it would take to drive there.

It would take 39 hours.

So instead I woke up at 4am to catch the 6am flight to Montreal before the *4 and a half hour* flight to Edmonton. Canada is huge. Luckily there was an American and a Kiwi doing the same journey as me (sounds like the start of a rubbish joke) so I didn’t have to endure one of the longest and most depressing travel days of my life alone.

When I arrived in Edmonton I was staggered when I walked into the Royal Glenora Tennis Club. I would describe it as the Wimbledon of Canada. 7 indoor courts, a world class gym, an ice rink, an indoor swimming pool, a jacuzzi in the middle of the changing room, a basketball court, as well as a decked out players’ lounge for the tournament. I think this was the best ITF event I’ve ever been to – please correct me if you think there’s anywhere better (not Cancun…).

The only negative thing I have to say about the tournament set up was the fact that the Airbnb that Charlie booked us for the week was at the top of a set of 201 steps which we had to climb multiple times a day. Cheers, Charlie.

There also seemed to be no shortage of off-court activities in Edmonton. On the Tuesday evening, the Edmonton Oilers were playing the Calgary Flames in an NHL match in town and half of the tennis tournament seemed to be in attendance – except for myself and Charlie who had to play our doubles quarter-final at ‘not before 7pm’ that day. 

We ended up losing in a match tiebreak. We might as well have gone to the game in hindsight. But luckily we did make it to a hockey game later on in our Canada trip, but more about that in the next blog.

We also visited West Edmonton Mall which is the largest mall in North America – it is 5.3 million square feet and has 800 stores. For context, this is more than double the size of Westfield Shepherd’s Bush. Our Uber driver told us that people travel from all over North America to stay in the mall hotel and spend up to a week exploring it. There is an indoor beach and water resort but apart from that, I don’t think walking around the inside of a shopping centre for a week is the holiday for me…

While we were at the mall we did an escape room which went just about as successfully as the doubles match we played the night before. We were useless. All teamwork, communication and common sense went out of the window and we failed to complete the room which I think was probably designed for families with young kids. Good stuff.

All in all, it was a fairly average week in Edmonton despite the classiness of the tournament. A three hour bus journey to Calgary awaited me on the Saturday morning. This journey could prove to be quite stressful to whoever made the singles final in Edmonton and wanted to play in Calgary Challenger qualies which started on the same day…

But more about that in part two of the Canada blog.