Wimbledon 2008

Saturday 28 June we went to Wimbledon with Sheree and Toni. We were blessed with beautiful weather which made the early start and major line-up bearable. The process for those without tickets is to line-up at a designated field and be issued with a “queue card”, so that no-one can jumped the queue or anything. They were running behind so we sat in our line for quite a while before they got to us and we were feeling a bit blue as we thought there were only 6000 tickets and knew they had already well reached that limit. Luckily on this day they had approx 9000 tickets to sell for general admission and that would get you in by 1pm, for the rest of the crowds they would have to wait patiently until people started leaving the grounds later in the day.

It only cost £20 for a ticket and you’re allowed to take in your own food and 1 bottle of wine per person, so it’s really great and you can totally do Wimbledon on a budget.

We had a couple of "hiccups" which made me mad but by the time we got through the gates and I was seated with a Pimms in hand all was good.

In the “queue” there was a lot of free stuff given out from various companies – umbrellas, muesli bars, bottles of water etc and we had purchased newspapers solely for the “free” gifts that came with them (one of which was a small radio which Niki thought would be good to listen to the cricket on – multi-tasking!) anyway when we got to security we were told that we couldn’t bring in any of this stuff because they weren’t sponsors of Wimbledon and were trying to get the brand on camera. You had the option of leaving it in left luggage for £1 but who wants that hassle! It was a bit OTT because you could bring in any other muesli bars/food. Anyway Niki’s radio had to be chucked, and Toni & Sheree had to give up their giant umbrellas and they turned the bags the newspapers came in, inside out, however we made them let us keep our muesli bars etc just took off the wrappers! They weren’t very thorough or consistent with their searches though as Toni got in with her free muesli bar – wrapper and all, and I also had a plastic bottle of Pimms in my bag which I got through with. I was pretty mad at the newspapers though for conning us. grrrrrr

And if that wasn’t enough we got a whole lot further down the line – so close to the entrance when Niki realised he didn’t have his wallet, so went all the way back to security as he had had to empty his pockets there, was told it wasn’t there, came back to me, I was nearly in tears…and then he bloody well found it in the bag with the wine. BOYS!!! I’m seriously going to go grey before my time!

First up we watched the NZ girl play and man it was soo close, but unfortunately she lost. It was a really cool atmosphere and even though we didn’t see anyone famous in the flesh it was really fun. We flitted between courts for the day so saw a range of men, woman, juniors and mixed. We also sat on the “hill” to watch the action from centre court on the big screen. We got a great cheap “souvenir” – a used tennis ball with Wimbledon 2008 stamped on it! The facilities and staff were fantastic, was really impressed with customer service for probably the first time in UK.

A mammoth 12 hours after arriving we decided to call it a day… Seriously it was excellent – and I’m not even a tennis fan!

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