Oh how I wish I had started a pickleball diary the first time we ever played PB. It would be fun to have a record of our first impressions and our journey. We began playing pickleball sometime around 1991 at a house we owned in Issaquah, WA.
When we bought it, the house was a fixer, and we completely rehabbed it. The best part about the house, little known to us when we bought it, was the unusual “Sport Court” in the backyard which essentially consumed the entire yard. Clearly no HOA! We learned to play with the wooden paddles that came with the house and we had fun having parties and introducing the game to friends. Sadly, we were very busy with work and restoring the house so we didn’t play nearly as much as we would have liked to. Also sadly, we sold the house after we got it all fixed up to buy another fixer. We only had the house for about a year and a half. With the way real estate prices have gone in the whole Seattle area, it would be nice from a financial standpoint to still own it!
Fast forward to January 25, 2017 when I wrote a blog post about fun and games and finding pickleball in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
We’ve come a long way baby! From our first court in Washington state to our first court in a foreign country, it was 26 years.
We have been nomads for the last four years, starting the day our youngest child went off to college. Since our first game in SMA, as of today, we have played on 69 unique courts in seven different countries. The best part about it, by far, is the wonderful people we've met through this sport. We're looking forward to meeting many more over the next 48 days on an epic road trip from central Mexico to Vancouver, BC. First stop Chapala, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. If you care to follow along, we'll share information about different places to play in hopes of promoting this amazing sport, and encouraging people to step off their home courts to meet other people enjoying pickleball worldwide.
