Wimbledon - Day 11

Started out the morning feeling very relaxed and refreshed. A good night's sleep followed by a lovely hot shower and a bit of breakfast (well a cereal bar and a diet coke.) I was leisurely getting ready to head downstairs to meet the team and discovered that I had no idea where my credentials were. Now, there are very few things related to the event that can be considered irreplacable, and the credentials are it. Normally, when I don't have them around my neck (required) I put them in the pocket of my cargo pants/shorts. Checked every pair, no luck. Checked the room safe (sometimes I lock stuff in there I think someone might consider valuable, though it rarely is) and it wasn't there. Basically dumped the contents of my laptop backpack onto the bed (and that's no easy task) and no luck. By now, my heartbeat is so loud in my ears I am sure I am going to drop dead from it. I am now sweating bullets. I lifted (talk about adrenalin power) the dresser with TV and refrigerator in it to verify it hadn't fallen under the thing, moved it from the wall to verify it didn't drop behind the wall. Neither was the case. By now, I am almost at the point of hysteria (Colleen has seen this before, and she'd probably claim it was hysteria. Either way, not pretty at all.) Because my cell phone is dead, and the charger is at the venue (another thing I rarely do) I have no way to contact my team and if they call me, they'll get a voice mail or some other crappy message (I assume crappy message because I wouldn't see a pay as you go phone having a voice mail box) and it would make them late as well as me. Now, I know that people always say they find it in the last place they look (duh, why keep looking if you've found it?) but in this case it was in the last place I expected to find it. I did remember putting it into the shirt drawer between some clean t-shirts after I found the thing, but up to that point, it was hardly where I would have expected it. It wound up there because I had originally left it on the dresser prior to leaving Sunday for our sight seeing and at the last minute had decided it might have value to someone and stuck it in between the shirts. THANK GOD!

What a hot day. It is going to be somewhere between 31C and 32C today. BBC Breakfast (roughly the equivalent of the Today Show) said that the temperature was 10-12C hotter than it normally would be this time of year. You can tell. What amazes me, however, is the number of people that are in long shirts, jackets, and the like. If I thought I could have walked up here without a shirt on, I probably would have, though I know no one wants to see that.

Went to the shop today and spent some money on stuff for Colleen. I found out that you only have to spend 50 GBP to get your VAT TAX refunded, but I haven't actually done so yet. I will have to give that a try, as they have a place to do so there at the shop. I also made sure to spend that so I could get the free AMEX gift (meaning I charged it to my American Express card, so I will pay it off when I get the bill) and it is some kind of beach ball and tube. It is really heavy, so it might not make the journey to Ireland at all. We'll see. If nothing else, I will blow it up and play with it while I am here. :) I just hope Colleen likes what I got for her. She didn't know I had plans, and I am not being sneaky since I know she reads this.

Spent part of the day working on the pictures. I am still not the best at it, but I did take some 40 pictures on Sunday so I posted some (seen in yesterday's post) and some to e-mail to Colleen. I have heard there is an amature contest here, mostly for bragging rights, but I know that the guys with multi-thousand dollar cameras will soundly thrash me. It of course doesn't help that I am generally bad at photography in the first place, so I'll just keep taking pictures and posting them for my family and friends.

Play ended about the same time again. I am amazed at how late it is here before it is truly dark. It was 9:45 or later. We walked to the tube stop and while we caught the tube fairly quickly, in the end we got delayed at every stop from where we boarded. I was sweating bullets because it was so stuffy in the tube tunnel. I was carrying my purchased bounty, and my laptop bag, and I wasn't really in the mood for drinking anyway, so we agreed we'd go to the hotel, and then find a quiet corner in the bar and have one beer from our room stash. You'd think that would be easy enough. Instead, Judy comes down to the lobby almost in tears and informs us that somehow, somewhere, she's either lost her iPod Nano or it has been stolen from the room. Because she left her pack in the room on Sunday, she suspected the housekeeping staff had gone through her bag and took the iPod. I don't know either way, but I would have thought the premise of the laptop would have been compelling enough to take the whole bag, but I guess that would have been easier to spot as missing. Just another bit of drama for our intrepid world traveller Judy.

Called Colleen and was I happy to hear her voice. I shared with her the bits I had purchased and asked what she thought of the photos I sent. Really not much else, as talking daily I don't have lots of interesting news to share. Then, I almost drifted off watching ECW wrestling (I forgot the English love WWE as much as I do) and managed a decent night's sleep. Tomorrow, BJ will be coming in late so that he can visit Harrod's, and I am glad to see we've moved into more of a stable mode in his mind so that we don't both need to be here the entire day.

Cheers!