Pimms, Strawberries...oh and Tennis

No one in their right mind gets up at 4 o'clock in the morning to line up for 4 hours.....you do if you want to go to Wimbledon though, otherwise referred to as SW17.

Mark and I decided to go early in the tournament to maximise potential grand slam player viewing. So we trudged across London in the wee hours, mind you it was light when we jumped on the bus at 4.45am, to join a queue of centre court ticket hopefuls.

It turned out we were 510 and 511 in the queue and about 50 people away from getting centre court tickets...bummer should have gotten up the first time the alarm went off. Nethertheless we actually had a choice of court 1 or court 2 tickets.

Once we made it inside the gates of the gorgeous All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club with lots of pretty purple and white flowers (petunias and hyacinths) everywhere, there was more waiting till the courts opened at 10:30am (games start at noon). It was a mad dash for seat with all the Australians at the Wayne Arthurs game - though he still lost. The most exciting bit was watching them set up the court for the match, which is so organised and proper - very hard to explain. The new umpire uniforms are very posh.

We went to our court 1 seats just in time for the 1pm start of the Tim Henman game. We had great seats right behind the umpire chair with a great view of the court. The game, well the first set, was very boring (nearly nodded off too) and we only stayed for that set, before we continued watching the game on Henman Hill with our picnic lunch (and Pimms).

We went for a wander around to check out the grounds; watched a set of the Poo on court 2 (from where we could just see Alicia Molik playing her game); had some strawberries and cream before going over to centre court, where the security guards were kind enough to let us in to have a peek at the end change - so we got to see Andre Agassi!!!

At the end of the day before trooping back to London laden with our souvenir tennis towel and match balls, we watched the lovely Kimmy Clijsters kick butt back on court 1. It's such a long day but it was worth it, but for next year we might give it a try getting tickets in the ballot!!!

Oh, another thing........some people get paid to have sponsorship material in their front yards, one house was sponsored by Yonex and another one Nike! How weird is that, I suppose its compensation for having 7,000 people park themselves outside your house for 2 weeks a year.

(ps pictures to come, promise)