Tank Crossing

I'm a little concerned how many people are commenting on various photos that are circulating of me with my beard saying I look better then before, your all just forgetting how good I looked before- it was good, trust me.

We left London on Thursday feeling extra sick and sorry for ourselves, the crazy freakout that was our night out at the Walkie and Roadhouse left us needing alot of r and r. Unfortunatley travelling days are not great for this sort of behaviour, especially when driving a left hand drive truck on the opposite side of the road whilst dealing with the poor quality of Englands roads and drivers. It wasn't fun, but eventually we got to Cardiff, the site of this week's big Australia vs Wales dance.

Friday we finally had our rest day, BT and Wristy were still in London so the rest of us managed to spend some quality time relaxing in the bus, of course the fact we were in the UK so had to put up with terrible weather meant that the descision to sit in the bus was an easy one to make. Eventually we went into town ostensoubly to check out the sites, but within about 50 metres of walking down the dour main street we decided that we wearnt overly interested in Cardiff itself, so we went into the nearest pub we could find, happily enough it was a Walkabout so we didn't even have to mix with any Welsh people. Once you have gone into your first pub of the afternoon it is difficult to then get back out of the pub and do some touristing, so we didn't. Many hours later the England South Africa game had finished and our positive intentions of a quite relaxing weekend in Cardiff had been nixed.

Cardiff, on game day, the Welsh just lose their minds whenever their mighty Dragons are going to go around at Cardiff Arms Park, every pub within 2 kilometres of the ground, and their are heaps, were packed full to bursting. Seriously it was actually a little annoying how hard it was to get a beer, but as kick off ticked closer the atmosphere began to boil over onto the street, there were only 70 000 peeps going to the game, but their must have been at least 200 000 on the streets, it was crazy times, Kloss and I had to wait (as ever) for the Tunny's so managed to stand in the most inconvient place on St Mary's St to get in about 50 000 peoples way as they tried to get into the match.

Eventually everything worked out and we went into the stadium, we were surprised to find that the roof was closed, but this turned out to be a positive, as the atmosphere when the 50 000 odd Welsh monkeys who came along to the game began to sing was absolutly mind blowing. The game was a bit of an epic with all of us going crazy, when old Stu Dickinson decided that Sharpie should have an early shower the crazy Welsh collectively lost their minds. Thankfully the mighty Wallabies managed to hold on for that desperate final 10 minutes and we enjoyed a good win, but overall Rugby was the winner on the day...

The atmosphere on the street before the game was electrifying, afterwards it was (wait for it) surreal. We quickly managed to find some beers to have on the street and proceeded to have a middle of the street party for the next 3 or so hours, we didn't look conspicous however as we were just one small group in a sea of street partyers. Wristy and BT had managed to organise some broads to come up from London to party with us so we didn't have to make specticles of oursleves trying to meet locals. We did however manage to meet up with a rediculous number of people we new from home, seriously it was crazy, people we had no idea were even in Europe just walked right by us and joined in the party, good times (shout out to Hargy and Gordo Lewis). Eventually we had to move off the street so we headed into Huggy's Bears Groove Palace - a good night had by all.

The next day we had tickets to the big Canada Fiji bash so woke up early and headed into town, the idea of a second game for the weekend was that we could have a quite afternoon in the sun recharging our batteries before heading back to France. This was fine until during the game when old Kapitan Kloss ruined our best laid plans by buying beer. Three Thirty am found us huddled up in the bus playing black jack with two random birds we met at the camp site pub whilst watching the France game (how good was Chabal?).

Keeping the lads up to 3 in the morning turned out to be a mistake the next day, as we didn't get on the road to France till mid day. We then struck traffic (lousy Welsh monkeys closing the M4) so had to sit in a jam for 2 long hours, finally we got onto the open road and rushed off to Stonehenge, the lads were not impressed, but my ulterior motive of securing a Tank Crossing picture was successful. We finally manged to get on a boat at Dover around 10:30 and into a car park around 00:30 am. Hopefully this time we learnt our lesson, next time we have a travel day we will be in bed at a resonable hour... best laid plans.