Our first exposure to the Tennis Gardens

Our first time into the Tennis Gardens at Indian Wells was really fun – if you have never been to a big time tennis tournament, I think you are missing a unique experience. The grounds are absolutely packed. Everywhere you direct your attention there are tennis themed vendors, bars with lots of big screen TV’s and food vendors. They are all extremely busy, but we haven’t had an overly difficult time finding a table to sit at to enjoy how the chicken tenders and fries seem to compliment the Moet champagne! We thought about taking a snack in the Nobu restaurant that is in Stadium 2 on the second level – their dining room has window space along the West side of the court that pretty much runs the length of the court – looked both very fun and very expensive!

We have evening tickets in Stadium 1 – the big stadium where all the highly seeded players get to play their matches. We learned, however, that once you are in the grounds, you can basically sit in on any of the matches that are in progress as long as there some seats. The smaller stadiums are all general admission seating only – first come first serve – and once you are on the grounds you can enter any one of them. However, even the bigger stadiums with the bigger names are at least half open to general admission seating.

We peaked in on a match where Maria Sharipova was dominating, but the place was packed and we didn’t think we could find a place for 4 of us. We headed over to Stadium 2 where the big American John Isner was in the process of defeating the Austrian Jurgen Melzer. We were able to find nice seats on the first level courtside and in the shade to boot – I really like this open seating. Even in Stadium 2, the 2^nd largest, you are so close you can hear the players breathing and commenting to themselves on their play. It is pretty cool!

Getting tickets for a few days in advance is a crap shoot – you have no idea who might be playing. We wanted to do one of the very early rounds, and we struck gold! We are now in the process of watching the world’s number one men’s player, Serbian Novak Djokovic take on that rapscallion Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis. While Baghdatis did not provide as much of a challenge to the world’s No.1 as he is capable of, just watching a match of this caliber for the very first time, and managing to snag tickets to the top seed and returning champ on our first night out is a huge score. We couldn’t have been any happier with our first day!

Talk to you soon!