Wimbledon

That time had come around again. After such a successful time last year, I was determined to visit Wimbledon again this year. And drag Mike along too.
Week one, and Wednesday morning was absolutely gorgeous here in London. Mike and I postponed a visit to some friends with a new young child and planned to head out around 4pm and try our luck in The Queue. Such a beautiful day was simply too hard to pass up.

By the time we got into the end of the queue, it was about 4:55pm and even after only 15 minutes, about another 50m of queue had formed behind us. The queue was slightly shorter than the two queues had joined the previous year after work. I guess I was about 20 minutes earlier than last year. We were prepared for hours of boredom in the queue (followed by the distinct possibility of not getting in due to the exceptional weather) – armed with newspapers, magazines, water and ham and cheese croissants from the best French bakery this side of the channel.

However, Mike was surprised by the speed of the queue and 1 hours and five minutes after joining the end of the queue, we were paying our 8-pound general admission fee and getting through the gates at SW19.

I showed Mike the souvenir shop (was thinking about more towels – I bought two last year) then we headed off to court 18 where I hoped Andy Roddick was still playing. But, he had cleaned up his opponent in straight sets (unbeknownst to us) and we ended up waiting for a British ladies doubles match to start. We had a good view of another ladies doubles match on court 17 so we watched that. Eventually the crowd dispersed from court 18 when it became apparent that the match wasn’t going to happen that night.

So, Mike and I headed off to an outside court where a men’s doubles match was just starting between an Aussie pair (Eagle and Stolle) and another pair I had never heard of at all. The Aussies were doing quite well, and were amused by the chants of ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi’ that went on from time to time. There was also a mad older man that would hold up an Aussie flag after one game and yell ‘Aussie’ and the next time it would be a Dutch flag and he’d yell something of uncertain origins. It didn’t help that we didn’t know who the Aussies were facing (Rogier Wassen [Netherlands] and Robert Kendrick [USA] - whoever they were).

I think Mike appreciated the tennis a bit more live than the hours I watch on TV. And the weather and atmosphere at Wimbledon more than made it a fantastic evening. We wandered back (via the souvenir shop where Mike bought me a dressing gown) to the tube station and we got home by 10:35pm. Brixton was very lively when we hopped off the tube and waited for a bus. We jammed ourselves onto a bus and headed home up the hill.