Last month I headed up to a beach volleyball tournament in Toronto – tons of fun! I was surprised they even played much beach volleyball in Toronto – but it’s right on the shore of Lake Ontario.

I went up to visit some of the guys I met and became friends with at the Turks & Caicos volleyball trip last Jan. (Some of you may have seen the cool little video I put up at after I got back from that trip – listen to my voice on there and you can tell I was definitely still recovering.)

The 3 people from that video that live in Toronto are Chris and Mils (married) and their best friend Dr. Dave. They told me I had to come up to play in this tournament and they were right. Special guest appearances were also made by 2 other Americans aside from me so it was a real International tourney.

One of the funniest things is Dave kept this cardboard cut-out I sent to those guys when they went to Vegas and I couldn’t join them. I had the Luxor hotel deliver “me” and 2 bottles of champagne. Here are couple of those pics I’ve never posted from “Mini-Yanik” in Vegas. And then finally the reunion

And now the reunion shot - (I really should have made my cut-out taller)

Anyway - back to volleyball… it was a 4’s tournament and we sported 2 teams “The Party Busers” and “The Conch Shackers” (you’ve got to watch the video to get it). Here’s most of the squad:

(from left to right - Dave, Mils, Chris, Liz, Stef and Ann standing up)

Here are a couple action shots from the tournament:

Here’s me in action about to spike the ball down!

The next shot is Liz blocking the ball. She was awesome! I loved it when she would block the ball and make the guys on the other team wonder what the hell happened. (Not good for the male ego.)

And here a shot of the “Party Bus’ers” - Notice Dave’s face as he’s watching Big Mike spike the ball. Chris (one of Dave’s ex-best friends now) pointed out this is Dave’s “athletic face”.

Just like in Turks, we had a lot of laughs hanging out. I don’t know how this got brought up but one of the girls on our team mentioned to someone else that she was taking a ‘pole dancing’ workout class. Of course, all the male ears perked up. So we decided to hold a grudge match with the 2 teams playing against each other for a bet. Not for money but for embarrassment…the losers of the game had to pole dance somewhere that night.

Of course, we had no idea where we’d find poles in public places but that didn’t stop us from making the bet. My team won with authority twice since they tried to weasel out of it with another ‘double-or-nothing’ game.

At dinner that night we couldn’t believe our eyes when we glanced over to the patio and saw honest-to-goodness poles helping hold the roof up.

Bingo!

For the entire night we badgered and guilted the losing squad into finally delivering on their bet. Here are some incriminating photos:

I know I said there 4 members of the team – but luckily for Dave, my camera was out of focus so I got nothing but a blurred pic of him. I guess his medical career is still safe from blackmail for the time being except this:

It was pretty funny because after the “show” - the bartenders had mentioned they always wanted someone to do pole dance out on the patio but they couldn’t convince anyone to do it before us (who didn’t need convincing).