It’s about time to catch people up on my post-Christmas break adventures; in January I took off to Los Angeles’ Lei-out beach tournament. LA is great with palm trees wherever you look, and even in the winter it’s always partly sunny with highs of 20 degrees. It was actually unseasonably chilly for California, but I managed to escape one of Vancouver’s rare snowstorms.
I’ll save most of the touristy stuff for my next post, but here is a bit more about the people and the ultimate itself. I picked up with a Victoria team (Notorious PIG) who were fabulously well-organized. They rented a condo right on Venice Beach with its own lime trees in the backyard (perfect for adding to our Coronas :). This was the view a few steps from the front gate:
Enjoying one of said Coronas with Meg at the house.
Friday night half the team had arrived and we went out for authentic Mexican at Lula’s which had kind of a creepy “Day of the Dead” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead) theme going on with skeletons everywhere and margaritas that will knock your socks off.
Holy hot tamales batman. It also looks like stripes are all the rage for women’s wear this year.
Restaurant mural:
A view of the Santa Monica fields where all the magic happens:
Saturday and Sunday games were fun. We were off to a slow start though since 4 people (!!) missed their flight. Not naming any names, two managed to make it on time anyway (missing their flight due to Vancouver public transit confusion) and two mistook the arrival time for the departure time and missed our first two games...
We had lots of close games, most not going in our favour in the end, but it was still fun to have so many good match-ups. Credits to Luke, Meg, Anita, and maybe others for these photos: Max skying an opponent, Karen with the throw, Loach with a great layout, team strategy meeting and team pic.
The tournament was pretty laid-back with time for mini-games at the end of each match. One team had us play Duck-Duck-Booze (a variant on Duck-Duck-Goose where the winner drinks; Duck-Duck-Juice for the under-21s ;). Chalk this one up to another little-known fact about Americans; they play Duck-Duck-Goose a little differently where they run in the same direction whereas we Canucks run in opposite directions around the circle. Strange.
Duck-Duck-Juice:
One of my favourite plays from one opposing team was “Scarface” in which the woman with the disc faked “shooting” the disc at each teammate who in turned fell dead to the ground except for one guy who went long. It was awesome and worked like a charm as we all stared at the people falling around us and just stood bewildered as the one guy went deep and scored on us! (sorry no photo)
A highlight of the weekend for me was watching the final between Swaroon 5 and Strawberry Love which went to universe point. I was metres from Beau Kitteredge, an ultimate celebrity ever since he literally jumped over a guy in one game. Here he is making a crazy layout to catch a bad hammer while dragging his feet inbounds (from http://sideline-photography.smugmug.com)
And now a couple of sweet photos from semi-professionals I got off the net of awesome layouts. (creds: http://sideline-photography.smugmug.com and http://pandippo.blogspot.com/2012/01/lei-out-2012.html )
Waiting for some late-comers to show up on the Friday night, we decided to practice layouts on their bed:
Any big ultimate tournament has a rockin’ party to go along with it, but sadly the party got shut down before midnight due to overcrowding. Police and firefighters showed up, but not the kind from the YMCA music video. Here is a shot just before we all had to leave:
We still had a good time rejoining as a group back at the condo. Here is a lovely picture of Lindsay and Lee, and a nice candid shot of the group:
It wouldn’t be a proper ultimate post without a re-cap of the best team names/costumes of the tournament...
- Rockatpus Prime (our only loss day 1)
- Fire-breathing rubber duckies
- Pants Off Dance Off
- Sand people (with Star Wars musical instruments kazoo/bagpipe marching along the sand)
- “The Monkeys [are taking over the world starting with Beach]”
- Mud Boating Rednecks
- Awesome Sauce
