Illescas, Spain - 9/3/10

ILLESCAS, Spain - The Pioneers made the six-hour ride back to Madrid this morning. And it's safe to say that everyone is relieved to be done with long bus rides.

In all, we covered about 1,500 miles accounting for roughly 30 hours in the bus during the past 10 days.

The team rolled back into the same hotel as last week around 3 p.m. before heading over to the pregame meal a few minutes later. As you may have guessed after reading Kyle Lewis' blogs, we had chicken and pasta.

Kyle jokes about having the same pregame meal every time, but it's not an unusual choice. Trainer Pat Hoxsey has been with the Pioneers' basketball program for the past 14 years, and he estimates that the pregame meal during that time has varied less than five times. That means Hoxsey has eaten pasta and chicken roughly 425 times during his career.

The team is currently warming up for tonight's game against C.B. Illescas, which plays in Spain's third division. Nobody on the team is looking past these guys, but the opponents warming up definitely don't look like the beasts that have played on the First Division teams in the past two games.

Illescas is a town about 45 minutes south of Madrid, and the team plays in a decent sized gym that appears to hold about 4,000 spectators.

Denver will play its final game of the trip tomorrow night in Avila, which is about an hour and a half northwest of Madrid.

The Big 2-0: Here's wishing guard and all-around good guy Alex Pickert a very happy 20^th birthday today. Pick was taken aback a few days ago, when after lunch a waiter delivered an apple tort with candles (full candles that you might put in a candlestick) and started singing "Happy Birthday."

Although it was three days early, it was a nice sentiment, and nobody has confessed to tipping off the waiter.

Hoop It Up: If you haven't noticed, forward Andrew Hooper has been busy taking photographs of just about every inch of Spain. You can see a selected number of his photos in the "Hooper's World" photo galleries.

In case you're wondering, those galleries contain somewhere between 3-5 percent of the pictures that Hoop has taken.