Of course, such a trip requires much planning (and saving) before you can even think about the holiday itself....

The Months Before

With such a long time to save up for the trip (the initial £2,000 we thought the holiday would cost) was quite easy to budget for in the 13 or so months leading up to the actual departure day.

Still it was quite hard actually giving up on the usual weekend creature comforts like the weekends away following Mansfield Town, and also missing the odd home game and the usual three or four hour session after the match in the pubs around town, still with such a trip as the outcome, I suppose the end result justified the odd restriction on your normal regime.

Tickets were not really, we thought, would be a major problem in getting hold of, but this was to prove a little more difficult than first thought, as Cricket Australia decided that they wouldn't have a massive English presence in any one area of the stadiums, this resulted in a lot of frantic messages being posted on the Barmy Army websites, and much tutting and condemnation of Cricket Australia's plan to sell thousands of tickets to any old Australian that wanted them.

The Barmy Army received a small allocation, to cover those that had brought their initial packages (luckily we were covered in this), but as for any huge ticket allocations for the expected 40,000 or so heading to Melbourne for example, then these weren't forthcoming at all.

However, what we didn't anticipate, that during the total disregard for the English, by Cricket Australia, was that they would sell us down the river, and hand over the small allocation not directly to the Barmy Army, to as still, an unknown third party money making ticket sham of an agency, that quite simply made a hell of a lot of money from the English supporters.

Put it this way, the face value on the tickets, was 28 dollars (around £12), and we'd paid three times as much.

All in all, we ended up paying around £500 for Melbourne and Sydney tickets, which to be honest, was a little over what we'd expected to, the extra money would have to come out of the beer fund to be fair, I just had the hope that the beer wasn't too expensive after all this ticket malarkey.

With such a long build up to the holiday of a lifetime, things could have dragged, but to be honest they didn't, despite the determination to cut back on unnecessary spending, I still managed the simple things in life, like during the summer heading to the summer gigs at Sherwood Pines and also attending the odd wedding or two. Rather stupidly I'd also managed to get to our annual November joint, this time a weekend away in Frankfurt. (For some reason, known only to no-one, a group of us always go away in November, to different climates, well mostly Europe anyway).

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