Wimbledon

For the first time in 3 weeks, there was no football, so we took the opportunity to escape to London. After a morning flight I met up with my old mate, Gavin. He'd taken the day off work to meet me and we drank away the afternoon reminiscing about the good old days and seeing what each of us had been upto in the years since we'd last met.

Gav, lives near London Bridge so these are some tourist pics of the old bridge and the surrounding sights.

I made my way out to Wimbledon the next morning and took my place in the queue. I spent about 4.5 hours waiting in line, but to the LTA's credit the wait passed quite quickly. The stewards were friendly and everyone observed the queue etiquette outlined in the booklet I received along with my queue number.

Finally I made it inside and it was pretty awesome. I couldn't believe how close I was to the action. Just walking around the packed grounds was exciting.

I got to see some good players and was sitting front row, I could almost reach out and touch them. The better known players I saw included, Sebastien Grosjean, Nicole Vaidisova, Dinara Safina and Ivan Ljubicic. I also caught the end of an entertaining doubles match between 2 Russian girls I'd never heard of before and 2 Jap girls Aiko Nakamura and Akiko Morigami (went 8-6 in the final set to the Russians).

A ground access pass is great, I found myself going from court to court after just a couple of games to see what was happening on the next court. I will definitely come back and try to get into the show courts with a grandstand ticket.

Here is my strawberries and cream. It tasted alright, but I was expecting alittle more...

The big screen, aka Henman Hill is where it happens if you cant get into the stadium courts, Andy Murray was playing so there was plenty of atmosphere today.

Thanks to Gav and Tam for putting me up for a couple of nights. I hope I can come back, your friends were really cool and I loved the vegetarian based Pho.