Friday saw our long-awaited trip to Wimbledon. The weather was glorious, the grounds were beautiful, the tennis was top notch, and the crowd management was atrocious. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Ah yes:
http://pariswiththeellisons.blogspot.com/2018/05/roland-garros.html
And I take back what I said about crowd management at Roland Garros.
We were able to experience firsthand England's weird fetish with queuing up, as we waited in line (and waited in line and waited in line) for tickets. We arrived at 7am, were given cards telling us that we were approximately 7000th in line, waited for close to six hours, and then finally gained admission to the grounds a bit after noon. The Queue (must be capitalized) was civilized and well-run for the most part, but it turns out that six hours is just a long time to be waiting in the sun with limited food and drink options, limited bathroom facilities, and not even a newspaper to read. We were very pleased to finally make it in. (My French tennis coach was incredulous. "Why don't they just sell the tickets on line?" Good question. Also, he commented that there was no way you could make 7000 French people stand in an ordered line for six hours.)
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| One small, tiny, little fraction of The Queue |
Once in, we enjoyed seeing several doubles matches and also watched some of Serena Williams' and Gael Monfils' Centre Court matches on a big screen while relaxing on a grassy patch in the shade.
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| Middelkoop and Arends, beaten by Americans Bryan and Sock |
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| British mixed doubles team Skupski and Smith |
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| Monroe (US) and Kalashnikova in mixed doubles |
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| Xu, who, with Dabrowski, beat Aoyama and Brady in women's doubles |
And, of course, we enjoyed the iconic Wimbledon specialty, strawberries doused in Devonshire cream.
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