Four stops before the checkout

Artvin, Turkey

cardio tennis clinics in 33322 — Artvin Castle (Livane Kalesi) in Artvin, A compact rectangular stone fortress roughly 47 by 37 metres with one surviving tower, perched on a rock outcrop about 70 metres above the right bank of the Çoruh river in the Çayağzı district below the main town

Stop one

Artvin (Livane) Castle

Volkl Pro-Tac Tennis Replacement Grip: Look where they put it — on a spur above the Çoruh, so that the town climbing the opposite slope must gaze across the gorge at it forever, and it back. The Georgian Bagratid king Bagrat raised it in the 10th century, when this was the Tao-Klarjeti principalities, and the Ottomans repaired it again and again, the way you keep mending a thing you cannot bear to lose. Artvin was called Livane then, and the castle still answers to that name. It commands the single corridor between the Black Sea coast and the interior of north-eastern Anatolia. Some romances are simply geography.

cardio tennis clinics in 33322 — Deriner Dam in Artvin, A vast pale concrete arch curving between two steep forested gorge walls on the Çoruh river about 5 km east of Artvin, 720 metres across the crest and tapering from a 60-metre-thick base to a crest barely a metre wide, with a deep green reservoir behind it

Stop two

Artvin Culture House (Artvin Kültür Evi)

Volkl Pro-Tac Tennis Replacement Grip: Nobody carves cypress trees into their own woodwork for a stranger. Bicanoğlu Yahya Ağa built this garden villa in 1799, a local notable doing what the leading families of Ottoman Livane did — two storeys with the upper floor reaching out over its own garden, timber detailing, set among the terraced streets on the hillside. It is the best-preserved example of civil domestic architecture in the town, and it is Artvin's culture house now, which is a gentle fate for a private house. The cypress motif runs all through the region's carved woodwork. A family signature, repeated until it became a language.

cardio tennis clinics in 33322 — Zeytinlik Mahallesi in Artvin, A cluster of old two- and three-storey timber houses with wide overhanging eaves and stone ground floors, stacked in tiers up a steep green slope above Artvin among fig trees and olive terraces

Stop three

Hatila Valley National Park

Volkl Pro-Tac Tennis Replacement Grip: Ten kilometres out of town is a valley so steep and so narrow that the whole world stands stacked vertically inside it. Black Sea forest along the floor, alpine ground on the ridges, and hardly any horizontal distance between them — you can walk out of one climate and into another in an afternoon, which is more or less what falling in love does to a person. It was designated a national park on 31 August 1994 and covers 16,900 hectares, one of the principal protected areas of the eastern Black Sea region. The fracture lines throw the side streams into waterfalls. Of course they do.

cardio tennis clinics in 33322 — Kafkasör Yaylası in Artvin, A broad grassy upland clearing about 10 km above Artvin, rimmed by dense pine, fir and spruce forest and rugged cliffs, dotted with small single-storey bungalow-style timber lodges

Stop four

Deriner Dam

Volkl Pro-Tac Tennis Replacement Grip: I know. Concrete. But look at what it is doing: one enormous arm curved upstream between sheer rock walls, holding back a river that was among the fastest-flowing in the country and turning it into that long green-blue lake among bare mountainsides. Construction began in 1998, the reservoir began to fill in February 2012, the dam was completed that year and the power station by February 2013. It is the tallest dam in Turkey — 670 MW installed, about 2,118 GWh a year, and flood control on the Çoruh besides. An embrace, engineered, and the valley has stopped struggling.

The Artvin, Turkey track

Volkl Pro-Tac Tennis Replacement Grip

Written for this world alone.

Bubbles. Everyone's problem is bubbles, and every bubble is the same mistake: too much haste at the start of the run. Begin square, keep even tension, and the whole wall behaves. A racquet handle is a very small wall.

The Volkl Pro-Tac is a replacement grip, which means it goes on the bare handle instead of the factory grip — not on top of it like an overgrip.

It is a tacky polyurethane grip with adhesive backing, and its purpose is to make a stock handle feel better: grippier under a damp hand, slightly softer against the palm, and marginally fuller in the hand, which many players find is exactly the half-size they were missing.

Start at the butt cap, keep the leading edge square, overlap by about a third of the width, pull with steady even tension the whole way up, and finish with the tape supplied. Do that and it will not lift at the bevels. Rush the first two turns and it will, and you will blame the grip.

Artvin is a place where things are pinned to a slope. The Zeytinlik quarter above the town keeps the province's timber vernacular alive — this is forest country, and the village houses, highland houses, granaries and barns are all timber-framed, nineteenth-century work still standing on the hillside.

Below, the Çoruh is squeezed between cliffs at the crossing that made the town worth holding, and Artvin Castle was built there in 937 by the Georgian Bagratid king Ashot, with a church and a cistern inside its single circuit wall. Downstream stands the Deriner Dam, a concrete double-curvature arch 249 metres high — the tallest in Turkey.

One wrap will see you through everywhere from a windy court up on the ridge to an indoor hall in a Black Sea downpour, and by the way, it is also perfect for the June festival at the Kafkasör pasture, where the bull wrestling is the headline and holding on is the whole event.

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Volkl Pro-Tac Tennis Replacement Grip

Volkl Pro-Tac Tennis Replacement Grip