Arrived back in one peice. house is still standing, grass needs cutting.
I enjoyed my time in Bury a lot. It was a shame to leave. But its not my home any more.
I’ll write more when I have more time. Right now I’m still a little tired and having to stop my kids from eating all the candy at once 
I posted a lot of pics on my facebook page. I will post them here when I get a chance.
Had this link pointed my way by grumps.
Please note that there are hundreds of photos from this trip, and you’ll get to see them….but I’ll get to that in a bit.
The plane ride back to the UK was pleasant. If you call bouncing around for 10 hours pleasant that is. I arrived tired and feeling like a fizzy pop bottle waiting to explode. I’m really glad I didn’t drive too. Being on the wrong side of the road is strange to me now. Especially going around bends…”oh my god were gonna get hit…..oh, oh yeah, I’m a dumbass.”
Friday was pretty much a bust. Jet lag kicking my butt. By 7pm I was out. But then Saturday I was refreshed and full of energy and lots of cups of tea.
I have a big list of things I wanted to do and people I wanted to see. So Saturday I made the pilgrimage to Portman Road to see Ipswich play a friendly against West Brom. Well worth the ten quid to get in. Plus they won so bonus all round.
In the evening my Mother took me to Culford social club for a BBQ. There I started my mission of drinking Bury dry of IPA. I also met a man who had worked in Ann Arbor for a month (about an hour and a half from my house).
Sunday was a riot. Hunting for bargains in the wilds of the Newmarket car boot sales. Americans haven’t got the idea of car boot sales. Perhaps my goal in life can be to corrupt them. After all they are great little fund raisers.
Monday I spent a fantastic day on my own (to start with) Wandering around the streets of Bury. Soaking in the Atmos and looking for people I know. That lasted about and hour then I gave Ruby from the famous Living in Bury St.Edmunds blog a call and we decide to meet up at the abbey. We met up with 21stC mom too and enjoyed the 9000 degree sun. A link to Ruby’s site can be found in the side bar. There you will find and in depth interview with me where I talk a load of balls!
Tuesday My sisters, my mother and I went down to the coast for a bimble. Had a nice fish and chip dinner and a 99 cone. Somehow one of my sisters managed to get chocolate on the back of her trousers and of course hilarity ensued!!
I do have some wonderful pictures of the event. But for some reason computers over here have gotten slower, connections unstabler and downright annoying. Every time I try to upload a pic it tells me to sod off and try again, or bumps me off line!
So pics will have to wait till I return to the comfort of my own PC!
More updates when I get a chance!
Arrived safely!
The Sight of the Sugar beet is enough to make a grown bury boy cry!
Now I’m gonna crash cos the jet lag is killing me!
I’m packed.
This time tomorrow I’ll be only a couple of hours away from driving to the airport.
Then by 10am friday I’ll be back in England
By 12 noon back in bury
by 12.01 in a pub……probably
This time next week I’ll be back in the UK. I should really start to think about packing!
Now do you think I need sunblock!
It sucks not having the Internet at home right now. It was one of those choices I had to make. High speed Internet, or petrol to get to work. Damn sucky job won.
Good news though. I will be back in good old B.S.E. on the 25th of July so I look forward to running in to you all. (I could use a joke about driving on the wrong side of the road now but that would be tacky.)
I’m looking forward to real beer, seeing familiar things, and telling people who I run in to over and over that the reason they haven’t seen me in seven years is not that I don’t like them its just that I’ve been on the other side of the planet.
I’m also looking forward to not seeing adverts for the McCain / Obama election running over and over and over. This election sucks. People have to realise if the vote for McCain they are getting George Bush again. If the Vote for Obama they get a big change. Will it be good change? Who can tell. But I’d rather see Obama get in just to have some change…not that I can vote here anyway.
I’m also looking forward to football being football. And a wrench being called a spanner.
See you soon
Wow, what a weekend!
We won Friday’s game, 2-0.
We arrived at the tournament site at 7:00 am on Saturday and I helped check in the teams that were playing early. At about 7:30 we ended up clearing the fields and sending everyone to their cars to wait because there was a storm moving through with thunder and lightening. They’ll play in rain but not with lightening. At about 8:30 the storm had moved through and the sky was sunny again. So we got everyone out of their cars and finished checking teams in. Games were delayed an hour so we played our 9:00 game at 10:00. That one was a tie, 1-1.
After that first game, we headed off to the pool party/BBQ. I am SO glad we had that opportunity! I can’t imagine sitting around at the field where the games were with nothing to do! We got to relax and the kids had fun playing in the pool and piling in the hammock. Good thing we decided to go back to the field at 3:30. By that time, the refs had pushed things along and made up some time from the morning’s storm delay so our 3:30 scheduled game started at about 3:45! We won that one, too. 2-0.
The way the determine the winner of a division is by points, 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss. On that alone, we were actually tied for 1st place. But then they go by goals scored against. If that doesn’t break the tie, they go by goals scored for. And if THAT doesn’t break the tie, they hold a penalty shootout between the tied teams. FORTUNATELY we had let in 1 less goal than the team we were tied with, so we won our division! We were through to the quarter-finals!! The team that had the same wins/losses as us wasn’t so lucky though. They were tied for the wildcard spot with another team from another division. And they tied on all three rules so they had to have a shootout Sunday morning to determine who was playing who in the quarter final. Glad it wasn’t us! Talk about nerve-wracking! 
Sunday morning’s quarter-final was 9:00. We won our game 1-0. We got LUCKY. The one goal that we scored was a penalty kick, and the rest of the game the girls played defense HARD to keep the other team from scoring. We went through to the semi-finals though!! That game was at 1:00. We watched the other quarter-final game at 11:00 to see who we were going to play. Both teams were good, but there was a LOT of pushing going on. The ref actually yellow carded both teams during the game. That game went into overtime (no ties allowed in the finals) and the end result was 4-2.
By the time our semi-final game started, the girls were really tired. They had already played 4 games over a day and a half. In the regular season, they play 10 games over 5-6 weeks! It didn’t help that we only had one substitute on Saturday, and none on Sunday. (Our age group plays 9 v 9 in the tournaments, and we only had 10 players sign up for it. One of the girls couldn’t make it on Sunday, and we knew that when she signed up.) We were hoping that the team we were playing was as tired as we were though, since they had just played OT and only had a half hour to rest before the game. No such luck though, they had lots of substitutes.
We ended up losing the semi-final game 7-0. The girls were crying on the sidelines after the game. The other team was playing really rough, and our girls aren’t used to that. We played the consolation game at 3:00 for a chance at 3rd place, but we lost that game, too…5-1. In the end we finished the tournament in 4th place, out of 25 teams. Not bad at all.
The teams that won 1st and 2nd were stacked, and there’s a lot of debate over whether that’s fair or not. According to the tournament rules, you have to invite all of the players on your house roster. If you don’t have enough players interested in going to the tournament (you have to have at least 6 from your house roster), you can pull players from other teams. The teams that were in 1st and 2nd only had 6 players from their house roster and the rest they pulled the best player or 2 from several different teams in their regions. A lot of the coaches and refs later told us how proud they were that we went so far with only 10 players on our tournament roster, and ALL of them being our original house team.
If I had it to do again, I would have pulled a couple more players from another team just to have some substitutes. 7 games in 2 and a half days was a lot for the girls, and I think if they were more rested they would have had a better chance of making it farther. But we’re still REALLY proud of what they accomplished considering what we were up against! 4th out of 25 isn’t all that shabby. 
That was all written by the wifey up there!
Just as a note by me, the team also took first place in the spring division. Black Stallions are the Champions!!!
Now I just have to do it all again next season!!
Well Detroit has been in P-A-R-T-Y mode for a week now since the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup. One Million plus were downtown at the parade. Hard to imagine that many turning out for an F.A.Cup win! In honour of the event I bought a new hat, don’t tell the Wifey it cost me $30.
Then on sunday, whilst enjoying the 90 degree weather all hell broke loose. Black clouds rolled in and the tornado sirens in the town where blaring out. We gathered up all that was important and headed to the basement. The Wife took the dogs, I took a 24 pack.
Fingers crossed folks, I may very well be in Bury St. Edmunds at the end of July. If anyone wants to meet up for a soda or two, let me know!
