Summer, summer, summertime

I was going to wait a couple more weeks before updating this, but have been so busy that wont be able to fit it all into the next posting, I fear.

So, where to begin. Well, we all thought summer was over but it has reared its happy head and started pounding the pavements with intense UV rays. Had to get the ol' sunblock out the other day. Absolutely unheard of!!!

What have I been doing with all this glorious weather, you may ask. Lean closer and I will tell you.......



Spending cash.

That's what I have been doing.

When I paid off my student loan a good few months ago now, I thought 'right, now I can do some proper saving; get a little nest egg; save for a house etc'. That pipe dream has been decimated with the prospects on offer to the UK dweller in summer.

A few Saturdays ago, a small crew of around 50 of us descended on the Ascot races like a swarm of locusts. After we were done eating the crops, we decided to hit the drinks and make a few bets in the hopes we would win BIG!!!.
The weather had other plans by showering us with hail for a solid hour. The little umbrella was dog tired at the end of it. Though the sun came out and everyone cheered.
The Queen came hooning by in her horse and carriage and we all waved at her. Shes a nice old lady.
Then for the horses. Everyone was in good spirits. Its at events like this when you realise how small the world is, when your mates know the mates of some of your other mates. Mate, it was crazy.
"Pom!" I shouted and beckoned. Over he strolls. "Gidday Jono." some random bloke sitting near me says. "ROB" shouts Jono, and off he goes to have a discussion with him, leaving me friendless and lonely. For a few seconds at least.

Anyway, I placed a few decisive bets. I won £5.20 on a race!!! "You little bewtay" I yelled, clutching my ticket so hard veins in my fist flared up.
Doesn't matter how much I lost. It was all in the name of fun. Maybe I lost £50.
By the end of the day, most people were right-offs. Especially the chicks. Most of them were unconscious. Ha.
So we all went back to Putney and I ended up in Camden (the other side of London) for the rest of the night. We were miles out. I decided to catch the standard 2 night buses to get home. On the second night bus, as I was passing in and out of consciousness, the bus started braking erratically. The driver started laying on the horn as well. Proper. People then started gasping, some chick screamed. Then I heard a few more screams following by an almighty thud.
"What the hell just happened?" I asked this wide-eyed bloke next to me.
"I think we just killed someone" he replied.
"What! Really!" I was amazed. Girls in the front seats were turning away, crying into their boyfriends arms.
'I gotta see this' I thought, rather shocked at my lack of human emotion. It must be all those horror movies.
I craned my neck so bad I think I strained a muscle. "Is it that bloke in the white T-shirt?" I ask the guy next to me once more. He just nodded, looking at me strangely.
"But he is getting up" I say "That cant be him". Now the guy next to me starts looking. "What the hell?" he says.
This dude that has just been smoked by the bus stands up, dusts himself off, and starts briskly walking away, just prior to getting into a full blown sprint. The driver and everyone around him were dumbfounded, as if they were looking at a zombie (they probably were). They all stood around looking at each other for, what seemed like in my mind altered state, an e-t-e-r-n-i-t-y.
"Come on" I pleaded, impatiently, "The guy is feeling better than I am".
After a half hour of mucking around, convinced that this dude would be OK, the driver finally started to crank the bus into gear and take me home. 'Good' I thought. I searched the papers the following few days for some kind of story but to no avail.
I spent the Sunday nursing a hangover, glad that that was all I had to handle. Wonder whatever happened to that guy. I am pretty sure he is a mutant.

Last weekend was huge. Quite possibly one of the biggest weekends I have ever had. Off. All. Time.
(Apart from Sevens Weekends - those things are huge)
It started with myself buying a few beers on the Friday night and deciding to drink them all. That was a bad idea. At 6:30 the next morning Renee karate kicked me out of bed.
"Hiyah" she says, hand also arcing in chopping motion.
"What the hell" I blubber, shocked, and hungover.
"We are going to go line up at Wimbledon" she exclaimed. "Come on"
"Owwwwwww mannnnnn" I cried out, like I used to as a teenager.

We got into the line at 7:30am, and already it filled the whole of Wimbledon Park. 'This was a serious line', I thought ' I better make a mental note of how big this line actually is, so I can compare queue sizes in the future'. Its a thing I do.
We got our queue card. 'Great', I thought ' we are only 8472 in the line'
Editor note: That is not exaggerated. That was actual place number in queue.
So we waited it out, chatting to a few people around us to wile the time away.



8
Hours
Passed

And we got in! Yay.

At the time of entry (3:30pm to be precise) the clouds opened wide and good ol' sunlight streamed in. We ate strawberries and cream (apparently its tradition) and watched a few of the matches played in the outer courts. Near the end of the day, we chilled on Henman Hill and watched the Djokovic / Baghdatis game before calling it a day. I was sunburnt but in high spirits because I paid £10 on a Wimbledon tennis ball. What a deal!







On the Sunday, we went out to............. hmmm should I say it.............. OK I will............. The Glee Stage show. Dont be haters. I don't care what anyone says about the show. It was awesome. It had all the original actors from the show in it and everything. Man, they are talented.









That finished around 4pm so we hauled ass into the underground and glided through to Hyde Park where we had another concert booked to see. This was the final day of Hard Rock Calling; a 5 day relaxed festival within Hyde Park. On the Sunday they had a few bands playing to the likes of Train, Barenaked Ladies, Mike & the Mechanics, Adam Ant, Stevie Nicks, and Rod Stewart. Stewart headlined. He was awesome, though he didnt sing 'Rhythm of my Heart' and I was gutted.







So that about wraps it up. We have a Spanish festival in a weeks time. Bands like Coldplay, Amy Winehouse, Chemical Brothers, Blondie, Black Crowes, Jack Johnson, Kaiser Cheifs and Kasabian will be there. Will tell you all about it.....

Meeting Belgians and Luxembourgians, in a van

Before I get into our latest road trip, a little catchup on things since the last post.

I had waited a long year for it, but it came around quickly enough......
What is this that I am referring to, you ask?
Roger Waters "The Wall" LIVE, thats what!
It was epicly epic in all epic ways possible.
Epic. The show was a sellout and 'remastered' as a copy of the original live show Pink Floyd performed some thirty years ago. They built a giant wall on stage, each brick with its own high definition projector beaming propaganda onto it. The things they can do with technology nowadays is mindblowing! Seriously. There were moments when it looked like the wall was collapsing in on itself in some kind of vortex type blackhole, only for us to realize that the wall was still there and it was the use of the projectors and some seriously powerful computers combining to do the job visually. An amazing concert, and well worth the wait. Roger can still rock out like the best of them. Voice was pitch perfect.

Checked out Brick Lane for a curry a few Fridays ago. Brick lane is the hagglers choice for Indian cuisine. We sorted out a curry, starters, naan bread, poppadoms, and 2 beers each for a tenner, all of which went down a treat. Mental note however: I am not ordering Vindaloo again. My toilet will thank me.

Renee and I celebrated our two year anniversary at a nice little Greek restaurant, famous for offering more food than any one man can eat. I was close to 'death by stomach failure', when my hosts informed me I had yet another main course to follow. I tried to groan a refusal, but I think they mistook my worried eyes and trembling lips as some sort of kiwi laughter and made the chef work quicker to get the food out.
We rolled home after. Lucky our house was downhill from the restaurant.

.................

When we realized we had yet another long weekend fast approaching, Renee and I took proactive steps to try and plan a quick getaway. You have to take advantage of these situations when they present themselves. The unfortunate thing was that everyone else had the same idea and trips abroad were becoming a scarce, or very expensive, experience. We were two seconds away from booking a pricey trip to Krakow, when fortune called, in the form of Corey. You see, Corey had just brought this new red campervan (akin to Postman Pats wheels) and he wanted to test the waters. A cheeky trip to Belgium would clear the pipes, and it was snap decision to change plans instantly.

With minimal planning, we drove an hour to Dover, jumped on a ferry for an hour, drove another hour into Belgium and decided to sleep in the van for the night. The team consisted of Corey, Bec, Ironmonger (also known as James), Renee and yours truly; a formidable unit.
The first nights sleep in the van was relatively tolerable, apart from the fact I had James' feet in my nostrils all night. We awoke early, fearful that some coppers will come tapping on our window and, after taking a quick leak, we rejoined the motorway and headed some 30 mins to our first stop, Ghent.



It was good.

Ordered pancakes there and I was foolish enough to ask for Bacon and Banana on mine..... I dont think they have bacon in Belgium. We strolled the streets, took some snaps and finished things up with a canal boat tour. Lovely.







We were locked in to stay a night in Bruges, so we headed that way and checked the place out. It was crammed with tourists which kind of made it lose that quaint vibe that was evident between all the flying bullets in the movie "In Bruges". We just holed up at a bar and slammed down pint after pint of Hoegarden and Leffe. Good stuff.

The next morning we traveled to Antwerp trying to buy diamonds. Its famous for them, you know. It was a really nice town also. Belgium has a lot of nice towns, we concluded. Spent a morning there accompanied by some Belgian waffles before heading to Luxembourg via a stop in Brussels. We spent all of half an hour in Brussels - traffic jam packed.








Luxembourg is a seperate country, and although it is right next to Belgium, the change of scenery was entirely evident. We stayed at a small place called Lultzhausen; small in the sense that it was literally only a hostel, a few houses and a church out there. It was amazing, situated right on a mirror lake, with large pine forests adorning the surrounding countryside. We had opportunity to go kayakking, mountain biking and basketball. I went up against James on the bball and got dealt. Like trying to face LeBron.











Our return back to the ferry in France was always going to be tight, but it wasnt until we had 40km to go and 45 mins to get on the boat that we realized we were going to struggle. Thinking ahead, we called and changed our reservation to the hour later. Thinking we had significant time on our hands, we stopped off in the shithole that is Calais and had a feed. Little did we realize that we were required to go through a hefty customs line to get permission back into the UK.
Our boat was leaving at 7:50pm
We were still standing in line at 7:46pm, having not even got our boarding tickets.

Shit.

The customs officer was trying to be difficult with us but realized the magnitude of the situation and stamped through our passports. We hauled ass into the big red van and accelerated like a formula one car to the ticket booth.
"Hurry, hurry, we only have a couple of minutes to get on the boat!!!!" we pleaded.
"Hmmm hmmmm hmmm, there are 5 of you?" the ticket dude said in an almost bored voice.

7:49pm - Got tickets.
7:49:20pm - Passed some old ditty trying to find car gate. We were traveling close to the speed of light at this stage
7:49:45pm - Find our gate.
7:50pm - Fly onto the boat Dukes of Hazzard style.

It was tight. Incredibly tight.
We all needed a beer to calm our nerves.

So thats that. A busy summer coming up. We have the Royal Ascot races in a few weeks, the Glee live stage show, Wimbledon (camping out for tickets), and then 5 days at an international festival in Spain, all within the next month.
Going to be poor and busy............