Wimbledon!

Thing One & Thing Two at Centre Court last summer.

Big Surprise: It's raining.

Wimbledon has started, which is probably a good thing for English football fans because for the next two weeks they'll have something different to think about other than the current sad state of affairs on the England squad.

This is one of those times when I absolutely love to be in living in London. The BBC has all-day coverage, which might not be great for work productivity, but is great for all tennis fans. Our first year here, in 2009, we went over and queued up on the first day for grounds tickets and had an absolute blast. I followed up with a solo trip a few days later, because I figured my pregnant state meant it would be some time before I'd be able to get there easily. (As it happens, we won tickets in the lottery for Centre Court tickets in 2000, but we haven't been back since.)

This year we are planning to nip over to SW19 after school to see the tournament in action. I think this is the first year that both boys are old enough to go over after school and wait around, hoping we'll get a grounds pass. We're going to give it a try, anyway.

I'll be going over there in any case, since I was lucky in the lottery and got two tickets for Court No. 1. I learned an important lesson the day the tickets arrived in the post, too. They came in a non-descript envelope, so non-descript that I thought it was junk mail and almost recycled it without opening it. Luckily, curiosity got the better of me, so now we're off to the tournament.

The picture above was taken last summer when my old grad school flatmate Kavita came to visit with her family. She is a tennis fiend, so we went over to the Wimbledon museum and also got a tour of Centre Court. Appropriately enough, it started to rain while we were visiting, so we got the full Wimbledon experience.