Wimbledon!!

Aah yes, one of my very favorite memories! There are so many stories about this particular voyage and I can't help but laugh every time I look through the pics. It was the opening day of Wimbledon and I knew that I couldn't be in England and not see it. So I took a sick day at work and ventured off. You can't get tickets simply by getting them off the internet or just by paying a lot of money; you have to wait in line for them just like everyone else. We knew we wanted to sit in court number one (it had a better line up than center court, as in: Andy Roddick, Justine somebody, etc., etc.) So we had to queue the night before. We knew that we didn't want to have to buy a tent and try to truck it home so we just brought the necessities. We knew it would rain, as it had been doing the whole day, but we were geared up with some waterproof garbage bags and each an umbrella.

To start it all off, we decided not to worry too much about setting up camp, we didn't want all our stuff to get wet before we even started. So we chilled under our umbrellas and ate lots of granola bars and sandwiches.

After the rain calmed down we decided to set up camp before it got dark. (Not that it would have mattered too much, our spot in line was under a streetlamp) Note the backpacks and umbrellas, not to mention the Sandsbury's bag filled with bagles and apples to boot! So this is a little bit like what our camp looked like.

...and this is what everyone else's camp looked like. We had lots of visitors come in the night to take pictures of the crazy Americans without a tent. ("and one wasn't even wearing shoes!") (They were wet!)

This is just me holding down the fort. We had at least one man on guard at all times. We didn't want anyone to be tempted into taking our precious valuables.

I slept as snug as a bug in a rug...or on a rug...more like a cushy bin liner. (This picture is when the drunk lady dropped my camera. Good thing I didn't meet her again in the morning after a solid 45 min of sleep.)

This is what the site looked like the morning after. We each ended up cuddling up to that cement wall behind me and used our umbrellas as shelter when it started to rain again. We rolled up like little burritos with black sack tortillas to keep the rest of us dry.

After a 6 o'clock wake up call from the officials, we packed up camp so we could wait in line. At the end of this line, we picked up our bomb-the-cool wristbands(!) and we knew that every minute had been worth it once we could sport those hot puppies

We finally made it to the gates in front of the gates where we could purchase our tickets. At 9:30 they opened the gates and let us in to buy the much coveted tickets.

We wandered around the beautiful gardens for a good long time while our matches continued to get rained out. We even took a nap (again) on the cushy pavement (apparently, lots of people with "fancy cameras" were taking our pictures) while we waited to hear from the referees if a match would begin within the next half hour. (they would promise the beginning of matches every half hour and then after about 28 min, they'd get back on the intercom to tell us that another match might begin in 30.)

...A beautiful gazeebo!

We also hit up the strawberries and cream! Wimbledon is famous for them. They were oh so good, as were the only fish and chips I even tried in England. We dumped loads of vinegar on them; after all, that's what the British do!We were oh-so-tired of sitting and waiting for the matches to continue. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that we hadn't slept the night before. This is us catching the Kodak moment while the green and purple squads kept running the tarp on and off the field to keep it dry.

We finally made it to see our American friend Andy get his match in. It was a surprisingly good match for being the first day when the top seed play against all the bottom guys. Our other American rival played well.

We were crazy-tired after the day was finally done. We hit up a specialty bus to take us back to the actual bus stop. The man who gave us the tickets even had an old-fashioned ticket despenser. Fancy.