We do enjoy a day’s sport over at Gardner Towers, so continuing on from a previous year’s trip to Birmingham for a Diamond League event at the Alexander Stadium we decided to go up for another event. This time it was a UK Championship event running over the weekend. We only had tickets for the one day but it was enough for us.
So off we headed up the M6 armed with some cash, a big packed lunch, and a new car. We got lost in Birmingham on the way up. We couldn’t find our way into the car park from the direction we arrived, and we then got stuck in a big traffic jam trying to get around to come back again.
Once in the car park we were still fairly early, so we mooched about the event village trying to get a decent coffee and picking up a few slapper-dappers and other general tat before wandering out of the village and making a seemingly long walk around to the new stand to take our seats. Well, we didn’t really take them, we more sort of just sat on them.
We were quite low down and being on the back straight we couldn’t see a huge amount on the main straight, but thankfully we were right next to the pole vault pit so we got a very good view of that particular event.
It turned out to be a nice day and we were quite warm sitting in the sun, but we were enjoying it, so that was fine.
The event itself only lasted for about 3 hours so it wasn’t a hugely draining day. We toyed with the idea of sitting for an hour in the event village before getting in the car, having remembered it being a nightmare getting out on our previous trip, but somehow I persuaded the girls it would be fine, and then regretted it after about 5 minutes. Next time, make me go and get a coffee and sit down for a while before attempting to get out.