Jenny Gunn blogs exclusively for ecb.co.uk on the first week of England women’s tour of New Zealand.
The mammoth journey around the world to New Zealand started at 1.30pm on Saturday 31 January when I left my house in Nottingham. It took a very long time. After short stopovers first in Abu Dhabi and then in Sydney, we finally arrived in Auckland two days later on Monday afternoon.
My sister is (now was!) heavily pregnant, due to give birth on February 15, but as with everything in my family nothing ever seems to go quite to plan. On arriving in Sydney I got a message from my brother telling me that my sister had given birth to little Freddie while I was up in the air! It’s a little bit strange to be on the other side of the world when I’m getting the first photos of the little man, but I’m still a very proud auntie and so happy for my sister and family.
Luckily (possibly weirdly?) we already have a life-size cardboard cut-out of myself (made for when I missed my sister’s wedding while we were touring in the West Indies – the life of a professional cricketer!) so at least little Freddie will know what I look like!
My family wanted Freddie to know what I looked like so they used my grandmas cardboard cut out! More like scare him!! pic.twitter.com/W9M8fjGspf
— Jenny Gunn (@GunnJenny) February 7, 2015
New Zealand is such a beautiful country, just a bit too far away! At the moment we are in Mount Maunganui which is a couple of hours south of Auckland and is on the coast which means pretty much wherever we look we are surrounded by lovely blue water.
We were all excited about finally training outside for the first time since September, but on turning up to the ground we were greeted by typical English conditions (maybe a little bit warmer) as it was drizzling and a bit breezy. It was still nice to get used to running and moving around on grass again (it is genuinely remarkably different to training indoors!) and it was a good opportunity to get the flight out of our legs.
We are staying in apartments here in Mount Maunganui and I have the pleasure of sharing with Katherine Brunt and Danni Hazell. With one big double bed and two smaller single beds on offer, it was decided that whoever has the most ODI caps would get the bigger double room on their own, whilst the other two would take the twin room. On this ruling, I was entitled to the big room, but we decided that due to Katherine’s infamous sleep talking (shouting!) that we would all be better off if she took the room on her own!
Interesting day at Hobbiton even though I have never seen any film or read any book pic.twitter.com/lQZN6qdLxR
— Jenny Gunn (@GunnJenny) February 8, 2015
The apartment block is in the perfect spot at the foot of the mount as we are just short walk away from the town centre which is full of shops and restaurants. A small group of us went for dinner on the second night, and we didn’t think it was possible but Dani Wyatt managed to shock us all again. She ordered a steak and when it arrived she politely asked “what’s that?”. The waiter said it was a steak, to which Wyatt replied “but I ordered beef!”. I have no words!
We are now heading into the final couple of training sessions before our first ODI against New Zealand on Wednesday. Our warm-up match against Northern Spirit on Saturday was really useful for the batters to get some time in the middle and bowlers some overs in their legs. But I now can’t wait for the real action to start in a couple of days!