Wales v Portugal

So, thus far we have spent the first part of our trip staying on our own, though meeting friends along the way at matches, but as we wave good bye to Cassis, we are now heading to Nice to stay with friends we have know for a very long time. In fact there are 3 lots of people residing within spitting distance of Nice who we will be seeing or staying with for the next week or so (more of that later).

The weather has been a bit more mixed, though still largely warm and sunny with just the odd downpour to mess with plans for eating outside for lunch.

Literally just after this photo was taken the heavens opened and we had to do something creative with the parasols

We are catching another England match while we are in Nice however, ahead of that match, we thought a trial run to the stadium for Wales v Portugal would be a good idea. Little did we know we had a couple of Welsh supporters hidden in our midst. I walked into the kitchen on the morning of Match Day 3 to find Drew (Canadian I thought) making coffee bedecked in the Welsh flag. I was just wondering what Catering’s reaction to this before breakfast might be, when our host Tim wandered in, uttered “and you can take that off for a start!” before heading out to get bread. After a long and lovely lunch (despite the rain) we headed to the stadium with a different Match Day crew, with some delightful youngsters thrown in for good measure.

We let them wear the Welsh flags for the game.

The game wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as the Wales v Fiji match, but Portugal didn’t give up and were very close to denying Wales their bonus point. A good night was had by all – well that was until we tried to get home. There was very little (actually there was bugger all) in the way of direction, just lots of police telling where you couldn’t go. We were funnelled a mile in one direction, only to be sent back down the other side of the same road back to where we had started from – all very strange and more than a little annoying. We eventually managed to get 2 Ubers home but it wasn’t a great example of crowd control.

In what seemed like a good move we returned to base and set about destroying the wine lake of Europe and before you know it midnight had come & gone before I finally realised I needed to go to bed.