Stockport 8s

hey everyone,
coming to you very foggy today. and im not talking about the weather! something about 4 day weekends are really dangerous to the concentration etc have felt all day that there is something seriously up with my focus. dont think im going to go to the gym today again, think i might pass out in the middle of the aerobics class, and sleep! that would be a hoot wouldnt it?! its all becuase i had an awesome weekend in stockport. i love the place, even if it is a bit of a hole! where to start with the story...
well lets start on the Thursday, thats when things went a little belly up for me. so i met the dear mrs arnold at the old school house bar where she was showing off her new scar (chicks dig scare) we popped over to the 51 afterwards to meet all the rest of her work crew, they seem nice if a little tough to talk to sometimes..then i whisked her off to the shebeen for dinner and a show, the show being my bro gig, MoJo (check them out... every thursday) so we ordered... em the service leaves alot to be desired, our burgers took over an hour to arrive... what?! then ealron arrives to add to our party and we lounged full on the couch right infront of MoJo who have recently recruited a keyboard player (i hope he stays.. he is awesome!) they were rocking out to a large crowd, mainly becuase it was holy thursday and every one was desparate to get the booze in before the drought... there was another band downstairs, so mojo were all about the electric set to be heard over the general hubbub. they were so good. coach chris joined us after a while a bit giggly from the success of dublinfest and had prob just caught cooties from drinking from the winning trophy cup..about midnight i bid everyone good night and trundled home with my car still full of bavaria that was destined for a raffle that didnt work out :( so it was 12.30 when i lugged the 5 boxes of beer, 1 magic box, 2 boxes of clothes and condoms and 4 boxes of glasses out of my car. this took a while, then i managed to pile them all onto the trolley that the porters keep for such emergencies, there was no porter though cos of the hour so i had to do this all myself..finally after much huffing, puffing and a serious lazy man load i managed to get the trolley into the lift, adn over to my door, but i couldnt get it in the door over the treshold so i yanked it wicked hard and one of the boxes of beer went bye bye and started to leak beer pee everywhere!!! aaaagh not cool!!! so finally i cleaned everything up, chucked the beer and the broken glass and packed my bag for the weekend, it was now 1.30 in the am!! crawled into bed to rest my eyes and was shocked awake at 4am to get the frak out of dodge and collect the girls.the adventure had begun!

we barely made our flight, apparently 1 hour is not long enough in the morning in dublin airport during a bank holiday! but we made it with minutes to spare and i didnt have to run once! sweet, promptly we all fell asleep on the 6.30 flight and looked a little worse for wear when we touched down in manchester. we then rolled out to the car park and found what looked like our taxi and it was open.. where was the driver?! we bailed in and he came running around the corner, apparently he had been waiting inside.. how did he miss us with our enormous bags? he brought us to the davenport hotel.. legend place, very into floral designs! it was still only about 8.30 in the am when we got there so the poor woman only had 3 rooms ready, people were sleeping in the other ones! so we drew straws and julie and i got the tinyiest room ever! but it had a bed and we promptly fell onto it and fell asleep! then it was time for our first matches.. we faced off against winslow and the blues in the rain, not a good start as we lost to both :( but as we were trying to warm up in the club house and chow down on some chilli and burgers and we met the people from the John Wig-Tour group. mental people we were all about the drinking games etc. needless to say the dublin girls (minus moi) got stuck in and bonded! that night we went to dinner in an italian that turned into a disco after the food had been served!! random! we rocked out and sweated out the food, fell into bed about midnight... then it was the tourney....
we dressed in 80s random gear and sweated our way through many games, we had so much fun, the games were only15 minutes and half pitch, there was loads of running, sweating (the outfits included tights!!) and laughes. we didnt do that well but we did manage to come 12 out of 16 and more importantly we beat the scots! even if it was only the junior team it meant something to us that got knocked out of the championship by the senior scots in teh euros! that night we split up and headed to dinner and the pub early expecting the girls to follow, about 10pm i was knackered so the little group of grannies headed home, only to see the others waiting at the bus stop outside our hotel!! the next day a group of weary tired ladies met for brekkie and headed out on mystery trail to team up with the scots and face off aginst the dutch.. my god we have a tough game in store for the worlds! they beat us fair and square but again it was good learning. we managed to scab a lift to the airport straight after the match (sweaty) and were early enough for our flight to get a burger king into us.. mmmm bad food!

so what did i learn? that england has better weather than us, better facilities than us, better skillz! what do we have... better looking players ;)