Wimbledon

Following weather frustrations which plagued the tournament this year, we targeted a Thursday evening in the first week of Wimbledon to catch some quality tennis. It seemed half of London had thought the same thing and the queue must have been about 800m long. After much deliberation we joined the queue and got in after about 50 minutes.

It took us a while to get our bearings but finally we decided to try and get some £5 returns to Centre Court to watch Rafael Nadal, whom we thought still had a set to play but in actual fact by the time we got in there he only had 1 game to go on his way to a straight sets victory.



Fortunately the weather held and we were able to watch tennis until about 9:20pm so we caught some more doubles action including crowd favourite Marcos Bagdathis who was quite funny and when they lost he hit a ball for a marvellous straight six which would have cleared the boundary on any ground.

Royal Ascot

A group of us had managed to get General Admission tickets to Royal Ascot which wasn't quite as classy as the Royal enclosure but that was fine as it meant we didn't have to wear waistcoat, top hat and tails! It also meant we had shelter from the inclement weather which was more than could be said for those in the silver ring.



Somehow the English have a knack of doing things like the races in a reasonably classy way which is surprising given some of people you see on the way out there. Anyway, we had a good day, were pretty conserrvative with our betting but doubled our money which was exciting. It was also exciting to find a caravan that sold dark 'n' stormies which was the drink that Josh introduced to us in Bermuda, and it was even made with Bermudan rum. The only thing that didn't really go our way was our trek to the silver ring as it hosed down and we got drenched. Oh well, got to get the full English experience of a day at the races I suppose.

Oh, and the Queen was there. I was miles away but thanks to a digital zoom it looks like I was a bit closer....