Visitor, Strawberry’s and Birthday Celebrations

Another beautiful day in London. First up this morning Helen arrived in from Erlangen in Germany where she is currently based. A very early start for her getting to our place not long after 9am. Great to catch up.

First event of the day was a trip out to Wimbledon to do a tour of the complex. After negotiating trains and a couple of buses managed to get delivered to the door. Have to say this was much more than I expected. After lunch we explored the museum which has a fantastic history of both the club and tennis itself. It finishes with the real trophies which are impressive. Pretty cool to see Federer’s name engraved up close.

We then joined the tour which takes you behind the scenes at the complex and is full of information. Good to see how they put the whole thing together. One of the interesting things I didn’t know was that the hill behind No 1 court where everybody sits to watch the big screen is called Aoraki Hill because the New Zealand sports club was there when the club bought the land and the hill was named in tribute to them.

The championship costs about NZ$200m to run each year. This funding all comes from TV and 13 sponsors. The sponsorship does work if you think Rolex for time keeping, IBM for information etc. The tour finishes sitting in centre court which is impressive. Great tour and highly recommend.

From there we headed into the City and met up with Ben and Mike at a pub. A couple of well earned pints enjoyed. Today is Jo’s birthday so we headed to Jamies Italian in Victoria for dinner. Jo had been at works drinks but joined us and we enjoyed a great dinner to celebrate her coming of age. A couple of lemoncello’s were consumed in recognition!