Friday 26th June 1998

Ostende: It was an 8am start and a quick escape for Chris and Sarah before any of the locals realized there there were still some uncaptured English in their midst.

Chris: "The drive through Belgium that morning was very quick!"

England: For Mark, Martin R, Martin F and Liz, rendezvous was at Sara's at 2pm. This was achieved by all, despite bad traffic on all approach roads. After a tight squeeze we all headed off in Martin R's car to the airport. We started wandering around parts of Luton trying to find the Parcel Force depot to pick up the team costumes when we noticed Ed and Helen following us, wondering what the hell we were doing!

Pickup of the team costumes went OK, and we arrived at the airport in convoy to find Andrew waiting for us at check-in. EasyJet had only one check-in lane open, so the sudden arrival of eight people all checking in together ground the whole system to a halt. Within minutes we had created a queue of about thirty or forty people and obstructed most of the airport's check-in hall. Fortunately, the airline was quick to open a second check-in lane once the problem became apparent, so eventually things returned to normal. With all bags checked in and money changed, we headed for Duty Free. Fortunately, there were no customs dramas this time - they must be getting used to Martin R going to Amsterdam. In the Duty Free shop, Sara was the first to nail her colours to the mast by diving into the spirits section and coming out with two litres of blue-label Smirnoff. She doesn't believe in doing anything by halves!

While were waiting in the departure lounge, Mark mentioned that he had never flown before.

Liz: "CTDC's first cherry, and surely not its last!"

However, he didn't seem to be suffering from any pre-flight nerves, much to the disappointment of the rest of us, as we would all have happily joined him in a medicinal whisky!

In due course our flight was called and we all filed onto the plane. We were positioned half way down the plane, so this time we were "the noisy lot in the middle".

Liz: "Mark got a stiffy on his first-ever flight - stiff neck that is!!"

Sara then had a major "snack attack", and was counting down the seconds until we were reached either by the trolley approaching from the front of the plane, or by the trolley approaching from the rear of the plane. However, with the flight being only an hour in duration, no sooner had the trolleys got within striking distance (the way that Sara was champing for food of any kind, no cobra would have done better!) than the captain switched on the "fasten seat belts" sign, and both stewardesses turned tail and scuttled away, much to Sara's fury.

Once through customs at the other end, Sara made it her mission to get some food as soon as possible, and this presented itself in the shape of the Burger King in the corner of the airport complex. This got the vote of the rest of the team, so we decided to stop and restoke before pressing on to our final destination. We then commandeered the largest table in the place, and quickly made it larger with the addition of any unoccupied tables in the area, as well as all stationing TDC personnel in every single queue leading up to the ordering counter. If only we had been able to maintain this kind of precision the following afternoon!

Unfortunately, the slickness then took a tumble, as Sara - in her haste to make inroads into the meal she had just bought - sent flying the giant-sized "fat Coke" that Martin R had just bought. "It must have been the lack of food making me light-headed!", she claimed. Martin was *not* impressed!

A further Keystone Kops-style scene then ensued, with the Coke expanding far beyond the limits of the original container and proceeding to drench everything in sight. Relay teams were formed to raid all the nearby serviette dispensers, but it was about as unequal a fight as a lone Alabama Redneck against Hurricane Georges (this probably won't mean anything in a year or so . . .). Eventually, though, the deluge was contained, and we dashed headlong down the moving stairway to the railway station, leaving untold amounts of sodden tissue in our wake.

Five minutes later, we were on board one of the huge double-decker trains that make up the majority of the Dutch rolling stock, and were on our last leg of the way to our final destination. For many it was the first time that they had ever seen a double-decker train, but even it was not the largest train that we were to see over the course of the weekend.

We got to Bussum Zuid and made our way to the swimming pool. Martin R had been there a few times for club training sessions while he was working in Amsterdam, but time had dulled his recollection somewhat, although he did manage to get us there without making any wrong turns. Shame his sense of direction didn't carry through to Sunday evening . . .

By the time we got to the pool, and the campsite, we found that Chris and Sarah had already been and gone. However, they had put up the tent, as promised, and were only out sampling the local sights and shops, so they returned barely an hour after we arrived. This meant that 90% of the team - plus the team photographer - were now in attendance, with only Rob still to come the following morning.

Our tent was only one of three or four that had been set up in the field, so we went around to the others making our introductions. In one of them we discovered a team from Slovenia, including Aleš from the Kranj team and some other faces that we recognised from the tournament in Slovenia in February. Andrew - who on the way over had talked of nothing but the England / Columbia World Cup football match, and had driven everyone nuts by providing a constant countdown to the kick-off - discovered that the Slovenians had driven over by car and were listening to the commentary of the match on the radio. He immediately settled in to join them, and sat down looking very smug.

The rest of us decided that we if were going to be spending some chilling-out time waiting for Chris and Sarah to return, we could do a lot worse than spend it in the swimming pool bar. There we discovered that actually *we* rather than Andrew had the last laugh, as the bar was showing the England/Columbia football match on its television! Unfortunately, the beer (or vodka in Sara's case) proved to be too much of a draw for anyone to be persuaded to do the decent thing and go out and tell Andrew that he could actually watch the match, instead of just listening to it, so we decided that what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him, and settled into our supping.

By the time Chris and Sarah returned, the rest of us had settled into what was to be our home for the weekend, and claimed our spots in the tent, so we were champing at the bit to live up to our team name and go out and hit the Bussum town centre in search of beer! We got directions from one of the locals and headed off in the direction of a particular Dutch bar. We followed the directions perfectly, but the bar had unexpectedly turned into a local shopping centre, so we decided to ask at the local McDonalds. Despite protesting that his Dutch was not good enough to ask for directions, Ed was press-ganged into the job, on the basis that there was absolutely no one else who *could* do it. His Dutch seemed pretty good to us, and it was certainly good enough to do the job, as barely five minutes later we were in the Dutch bar.

We had had only one or two drinks when we were joined by the guys from the pool who had given us the directions in the first place. They said that they were heading on to Murphy's Irish bar a bit further up the road, so we joined them and made it our home for the rest of the night. Murphy's, strangely enough, didn't serve Murphy's, but we more than made do with the Beamish Red that they had on draught, while Sara more than held her own on the vodka.