Wimbledon 2010 Day 5: Practice Courts - JJ

I am SUCH a child of advertising … I saw the Addison Lee app for iPhone advertised on the TV and sought it out! This was a bit of a risk using it to get to the queue as early as possible – but it seemed quite impressive – it confirmed the booking, sent me a text when the car was allocated and what the contact details would be.

What it DIDN’T tell us was that we were getting one of those drivers that just loves to chat – and at 5:30 in the morning neither of us were particularly awake! Initially it was ok – he seemed to know about tennis, but after he swerved to avoid a bollard and swerved to avoid hitting a stationary car… we were more concerned about him concentrating on the road!

Not having done the queue route by cab before – I sent him to a car park that I’d used the previous time – which was spectacularly shut!
So we turned and headed back to where the initial “destination” of the Wimbledon Tennis Museum was showing on his SatNav. This resulted in more cabbie lecturing of “you should pay attention to roads and landmarks”…
Even when we got to where people were headed – as we got out he was all “drink water”… but it has to be said £20 from my place in Richmond to Wimbers was a good deal – irritating cabbie not withstanding!

Still I felt relatively confident – it was 5:45 and we’d made excellent time.
Except we hadn’t – we were 2000+ in the queue – some 600 behind the courts… sigh!

We settled down behind a mother and daughter – their first trip and I bought myself a Fleecy picnic blanket (in the GOAT’s honour) from the various newspaper people.
We moved around the field periodically and eventually got in and were herded down the steps near the Pimms lawn as before.

We headed up to the practice courts and wandered up to where the players come in and out – and saw James (Jambon) and Kelle… again! What were the odds? Well given that Xenon21 from am.com (Zainab) was also there – I’d say the odds were small to none, as heading to the practice courts seems to be a tradition!!!
We chatted for a bit and it was nice to finally meet Kelle – but they were staying put for a while, and we wanted to get going to see some tennis.

We queued up for the practice courts, and we were talking about GOAT, and Cilla said “Speaking of Sneki… I’m sure that’s her there…” – she wandered over to the nearer courts, and wandered… and wandered – JJ was tucked away out of sight!

Today there were quite a few people waiting so we had to wait for a bit – and I was convinced we’d get there – and the goat would be finished! But luckily – she was in for the long haul!

We settled ourselves in for some pics – here are a few … once I’m done Wimbledoning – I’m going to go through my sets on Flickr and have a page for Gallery Links so please check there for more pics.