Wimbledon 2007

The verdict: that sickie was worth any guilt incurred (besides, really I am on the US payroll and still technically get all the holidays!).

I’ve always enjoyed live tennis, but Wimbledon was a treat beyond what we anticipated it to be. Of course, we were home last night to grab our seats on-line and were minorly peeved when Ticketmaster cookied our session and gave us the first set of seats we were offered instead of the slightly better seats we got on our second try.

Also of note, we had our first (human) overnight visit to our flat in London last night – Jon’s friend Noah was flying back to NYC from Greece, had an overnight layover, so we played host. From the state of his suitcase, we figure his last few nights on Mykonos must have been pretty wild. He didn’t even bother to take his shirts of the hangers before shoving them in his suitcase ;)

Anyway, we packed a great picnic lunch for our excursion. Wimbledon doesn’t have separate day and night sessions so I figured I should arm us with lots of snacks. So to us it was logical that the tube station to exit would be, hmmm – Wimbledon? Nope – like many nonsensical things in the U.K., we followed the crowd off at Southfields and started the hike. Then we saw a bus which turned out to be a shuttle bus (which doesn’t take monthly passes of course), so we hopped on. After shelling out a quid fifty each, we realized that the bus was dawdling down the street and hopped off when the bus was forced to stop for a sick passenger. We finally got to the stadium and joined the queue, which literally seemed to go on for ages and snaked back and forth; when people started dodging to the side of the line, we hopped over as well and made our way in.

The tournament is held at a private club called the All England Lawn Tennis Club and the grounds are absolutely beautiful – flowers planted everywhere and the grounds are so small that there are no bad seats.

Here is the view of Center Court from our seats:

So, in the end we didn’t have to curse Ticketmaster for our back row seats – in fact, it was pretty lucky because when it started to drizzle everyone in our row could pull out the umbrellas, but any further down and you couldn’t because you would block people’s view! Center Court also has a peculiar section we had never seen before – the Royal Box. No Queen on site today, though.

Some of the most fun matches of the day were on the side courts, because we were so close to the players that you could touch them! Of course, it would not be a summer day in England without some rain, so we took a few breaks indoors.

As we were getting dressed, I asked Jon, do you think we need to dress up? Which he promptly dismissed. But I will say, that there were plenty of men in suits and ladies in dresses and hats – only in the U.K.! And of course, the umpires and line judges are dressed to the nines as well (though in American designer Ralph Lauren :) )

All around us, many bottles of champagne were popping and we got in on the fun with some traditional strawberries and cream (the thing to eat at Wimbledon), which were bargain basement priced at £2.25 (seriously, compared to U.S. sporting event pricing, that is cheap!).

There was a great roster of play today and indeed helped us celebrate Independence Day with some American tennis players:

Andy Roddick / Paul-Henri Mathieu
Venus Williams / Maria Sharapova
Justine Henin / Serena Williams