Wimbledon 2009

My trip to Ireland saw the end of May, and June meant one thing - Wimbledon. The Captain and I decided to do what we'd done the year before - go on the middle Saturday, turn up at 8am, queue for hours and have a bloody good day. This year we also took a picnic breakfast, and enjoyed ham and cheese croissants, strawberries and orange juice whilst marking our place in the endless queue.

The Captain soaking up the sun.

The weather was great. In fact, we were in the middle of a level 3 'heatwave', meaning that temperatures got up to 30 degrees during the day and not less than 17 at night. We found this quite funny, but nevertheless enjoyed the sunshine. Eventually though, my poor fair skin was at risk, so I did the very British thing and sat under an umbrella in the sunshine, whilst the Captain worked on her tan.

We got in at about lunch time, the same as we had the year before despite being further back in the queue. We again did something terribly British - we got straight into another queue! We wanted to get onto court 3, as a few of the big names were playing there. Eventually we did get in, just in time to see Jelena Jankovic (ranked 6th) lose to Melanie Oudin, an 18 year old American girl (ranked 124th). We stayed were we were to watch Amelie Mauresmo play Flavia Pennetta. I'm pretty sure that GMTV's John Stapleton was in the audience for that on... Bit of celeb spotting on top of great tennis!

Jelena Jankovic

Amelie Mauresmo

I think that's John Stapleton, front row, to the right of the guy in the white hat.

After that we decided to go for a wander. We went past Caroline Wozniacki playing ladies doubles. We saw her play last year, so we stopped to watch for a little bit. The Captain had a couple of friends there this year, and one of them messaged her to say they'd managed to blag their way onto court 2 and were watching Lleyton Hewitt play. The challenge was on - we had to get there too! Court 2 is one of the courts that you can't get into with just an ground pass. We finally found a guy willing to let us in, and we got to watch Dinara Safina, who was women's world number 1 at the time. Not too shabby!

Caroline Wozniacki

Dinara Safina

Then it was back to court 3, this time for some Aussie action. We had planned all day to see Sam Stosur and Renee Stubbs playing in the doubles, and not only did we see them play, we saw them win AND we got Sam Stosur's autograph. Needless to say, Nan did not get that particular copy of the program! They played against Amelie Mauresmo and Svetlana Kuznetsova, so we got to watch four great women play (well, three great women and one half man/half woman!).

Sam Stosur and Renee Stubbs, with Stosur signing the program for the Captain.

Last but not least, we had one more thing we wanted to accomplish. We wanted to get into centre court. In the end, it was easier to get into centre court than it was to get into court 2! We just walked straight in. Granted, the last match had just finished, but we did get to see the brand new roof close and pretend for a while that we were amongst the lucky ones for a change.

Centre Court.

We were pretty much at the end of play for the day by then, so it was time for the long trip home to Essex. I forgot to put in for the ballot for this year, so if I want to go again, looks like it'll be hours in the queue once again!