Four stops before the checkout

Constanța, Romania

Stop one

Constanța Casino

Volkl Vostra V7 Tennis Racquet: Look at what a century of Black Sea weather does to a wedding cake. This was the great Art Nouveau pleasure palace of the coast, shell-shaped windows staring straight out at the water on the promenade, opened just before the First World War — and during that war they turned it into a hospital. Then it stood empty for decades, salt-bitten, taking gale after gale full in the face with nobody inside to close a shutter. That is my favourite kind of ruin: not bombed, not burned, just weathered, patiently, by an entire sea. It has been restored now, which I am told is good news and which I am choosing to accept. The storms will be back. They always come back.

Stop two

Ovid Square and the statue of Ovid

Volkl Vostra V7 Tennis Racquet: Now here is my patron saint of complaining about the climate. Rome's most fashionable poet, exiled by Augustus to this frontier town, and he never once got over the weather. He complained about the wind. He complained about the neighbours, but mostly the wind. And best of all, he complained that the wine froze solid — solid — so that it was served in chunks still holding the shape of the jar it had been in. Wine you chew, ladies and gentlemen, eyewitness testimony from the Black Sea coast. He died here without ever getting his pardon. The brooding bronze on the plinth is nineteenth-century and stands in front of the National History and Archaeology Museum, sulking at the sky. I would have adored that winter.

Stop three

The Roman Mosaic Edifice (Edificiul Roman cu Mozaic)

Volkl Vostra V7 Tennis Racquet: Fourth century, ancient Tomis: an enormous pavement of coloured stone laid across a merchant complex that steps down the terraces toward the harbour, with storerooms underneath still holding amphorae — oil, wine, grain and fish sauce going out to the empire and coming back in, all of it under one covered hall now. And here is why I like it. Every last jar down there was hostage to one thing: the state of the sea. This water was barely sailed in winter at all — you shut the season, you sat on your grain, and you waited for the sky to give permission. That mosaic is the floor of a very long argument about the weather. They have roofed the whole thing to keep the rain off it, which frankly feels like cheating.

Stop four

The Carol I Grand Mosque

Volkl Vostra V7 Tennis Racquet: Early nineteen hundreds, built under King Carol the First, and note the trick of it: reinforced concrete, one of the first such buildings in the entire country, dressed up in Moorish and Byzantine clothing. Concrete, on a coast that eats stone with salt spray — somebody was thinking about the long term. Inside there is a huge Ottoman prayer carpet, a gift from Turkey. But the reason I come here is the spiral staircase up that tall slender minaret, because from the top you get the old town, the whole port, the ships and the grain terminals, and then thirty clear miles of Black Sea beyond them. Which means you see the front coming in a good while before anybody at street level does. Best weather watch in Romania. I never come down when it is interesting.

The Constanța, Romania track

Volkl Vostra V7 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Forty floors up, the thing that keeps me calm is weight. A light cradle swings in the wind and terrifies you. A heavy one hangs where you put it. Everybody wants light until they are actually up there.

The Volkl Vostra V7 is the heavy one in this family and it is better for it. A 645 cm² / 100 in² head, 300 g / 10.6 oz unstrung — about 11.2 oz strung — 68.5 cm / 27 inches, a 24-26-23 mm tapered beam, a 16×19 pattern, and a balance at 32 cm, just under an inch head light.

Strung up it carries a swingweight around 320, which is the number that tells you what this frame really is: explosive from the baseline and steady when somebody hits hard at you. The extra thirty grams over the V6 do not make it harder to swing so much as harder to push around. You get plough-through, depth without steering, and a planted feel on the return.

Volkl's RED Cell and REVA construction keep the comfort intact. It suits a confident club player with a full swing who has found lighter frames getting knocked off line.

Constanța is a town of glass I would very much like to get at. The Casino stands alone on the Black Sea promenade like a wedding cake somebody left out in the sea air for a century, all Art Nouveau curves and shell-shaped windows facing the water, opened just before the First World War and turned into a hospital during it.

Then decades of standing empty and salt-bitten before the restorers arrived. Salt is the enemy of every pane I have ever worked on, and that building has taken a hundred years of it straight off the sea.

The rest of the old town has held its footing just as long. On Ovid Square the bronze poet broods in front of the museum, exiled here by Augustus to a frontier that he never stopped complaining about — the wind, the neighbours, and most memorably the wine, which froze so hard it was served in chunks still holding the shape of the jar.

Near the port the Roman Mosaic Edifice keeps a fourth-century pavement stepping down toward the harbour of ancient Tomis, with the merchants' storerooms beneath it.

A frame this stable gets used everywhere from a gusty seafront court by the promenade to a still indoor hall behind the old town, and it is also perfect for the Constanța player who has been getting blown about by the wind off the water.

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Volkl Vostra V7 Tennis Racquet

Volkl Vostra V7 Tennis Racquet