Adventures with boards and balls

Wednesday saw me head back down to Sydney for one last visit with my Rachel before I head off into the unknown continent of Asia next week. It was a fairly uneventful journey back, hour or so drive down the beautiful “Captain Cook Highway” to Cairns, a relatively cramped (3 big shoulder blokes sat together) flight down to Sydney and then a quick train ride out to my airbnb.

Thursday Morning I made my way back out to Manly Beach for my second surf lesson, it went a lot better than my first. Due to the high tide we spent more time paddling out to deeper waters and then surfing back in… and yes I was actually surfing at times… standing up for seconds at a time, steering the board and even consciously choosing when to get off instead of falling on a few occasions. I also happened to notice a group of extremely toned lads playing volleyball near where we were surfing who were all wearing matching St Andrews Cross Speedo’s… it was actually the Scottish sevens rugby team!

Rugby was the theme for the next few days, Friday morning I made my way down to Alianz Stadium for day 1 of the HSBC world rugby Sevens to watch the England women do their thing! Its a nice enough stadium, the weather was all right… the beer and food were expensive oh and the England team suuuuuuuuuuuuuucked! They lost 2 out of the 3 games they played against teams they should have beaten and never really looked interested.

Saturday was intentionally a very quiet day involving very little activity and plenty of napping because at 11:30pm I donned my old faithful white shirt with my favourite red rose that always makes me feel a foot taller and headed out to meet Rachel and on to the Casino (only bar allowed to be open all night) to watch the opening weekend of the six nations!! COME ON ENGLAND!! we spent the next six hours surrounded by various nationalities of rugby fans cheering on Scotland (well I was , Rachel not so much) and England to victory! We stumbled out into the dawn sunlight at about 6am after a great night, knowing that we would be meeting up a mere 5 and a half hours later to see if the England Sevens boys could do the business!

There was a minor delay when I slept through… my alarm, a couple of messages from Rachel oh and 7 missed calls…. whoops…. so yeah we missed the first England game against Argentina but thankfully the boys managed to get the win done without us and we headed down to cheer them on for the semi-final and eventually the final as well! As sevens always is, it was a great party with great fans, the especially fun and loud ones being from Fiji and Kenya and England played really well and were unfortunate to get soundly beaten by a great South African team who were out for revenge from their loss to us in the pool stage. I could have also done without it being nearly 40 degrees for most of the day as I'm pretty sure I sweated through every piece of clothing I was wearing and probably lost more weight than a F1 drive during the Bahrain GP!Read more