Thursday saw us leaving our billets at St. Aidan’s and moving on to Yarm School, about ten miles south-west of Middlesborough. After departing early in the morning we proceeded to travel to York, an old city which has been inhabited since Roman times and has been an important stronghold for many civilisations. We were given the instructions to be back at the bus by 3:30 and therefore had a free roam for the rest of the day. We split up and walked around the city. My group, which consisted of Skinner, Ben, Jake P, Night, Glasper, Dan Sull, Ian and [View Full Entry]

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Whilst most of us had lie ins, a couple of the boys who were staying with teachers had to go to school early before the mid-week game. Here is a match report by captain Cameron Skinner: “A for once sunny English morning greeted the boys as they arrived at Pannal CC to play St. Aiden’s. After winning the toss and electing to bowl, Tynan and Jake Sullivan both started strongly to take wickets in the opening spell to have the hosts on the backfoot at 3 for 19 after 11 overs. Wickets from Ian coming on at 1st change kept the [View Full Entry]

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Today was a free day with our billets. A handful of us went into Manchester City Centre where we were more scared than we ever have been in our entire life, brisbane makes you feel a lot safer! [View Full Entry]

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The earliest start of the tour did not begin in good fashion as we encountered our first bit of serious rain so far. We met at the school at 6:45 and following some farewells we hopped on the bus ready for the 5 hour coach journey to Manchester. The majority of this journey was spent catching up on sleeping from parties in previous nights. We stopped at some services to get food and coffee then went the remaining one hour to where we were playing our game. When we arrived we were slightly early and our opposition had not yet arrived. [View Full Entry]

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Today was going to be our most relaxing day of the tour so far. Although late nights for 95% of the team meant that the 8 o’clock start was not welcome, everyone clambered onto the bus. Our first stop was Hambledon, a small village with a cricket oval. It was here that the rules for cricket were first drawn up and has a place in sporting history as the original home of cricket. Around the pub that the committee meetings were held there were paintings and drawings of the original games to be played out on the Broadhalfpenny oval (The Hambledon [View Full Entry]

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We left our mansion at the Holloway University after a big breakfast on the day that we would meet our first billets of the tour. We had a fair bit of sightseeing to do first and this included a trip to Windsor Castle. Once we found how to get in, and subsequently bought 32 tickets we entered the Queen’s residence and it was a sight not many of the boys had seen before with the size and structure of the buildings being amazing. After lots of photos with a beefeater we wandered the grounds and returned at 11 o’clock for the [View Full Entry]

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We awoke on Monday and stumbled half asleep into the dining hall for our last meal at the school. Another fry up with a cereal of our choice set us up for the day. However, there was one more thing I had to do before we left. In our time there, most of us had become friends with Liam. Liam was a Welshman who played U16 rugby for Cardiff Blues and used to be at the Charlton Athletic soccer academy. Needless to say he had made a fool of me in our game of touch two days previously with steps almost [View Full Entry]

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We awoke in our dorms on Sunday ready for our first game. Adam Nightingale and I were to take the game off as part of our rotation system. Following a fry up and cereal in the school dining hall we went out to watch the military parade of the school as a practice for when a member of the royal family comes to watch them in two weeks. Though we started off very interested, after an hour and a half we began to get rather bored and were anxious to start our game We went into the match eager for a [View Full Entry]

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The final morning of mainland Europe started by some more long life milk. After quickly packing our bags we quickly got on the bus. Of course, the drive couldn’t be without incident as we encountered another stage of the rally and had our driver had to pull off some fantastic manoeuvring to get us back on the road. A number of us slept on this trip and awoke as we were coming up to customs in Calais. Once we were all through we drove up to the ferry which was to take us to Dover. We had had a fantastic French [View Full Entry]

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We awoke on Friday to another continental breakfast before starting the day’s activities with a visit to the largest British cemetery in the world, Tyne Cot. There were over 11,000 graves there and about 1800 belonged to Australians. Our guide gave us a run down of the events that led to this mass murdering. This was followed by a visit to a museum that had real preserved trenches, along with guns, bombs and other such things from the great war. Next we travelled to Ypres, a town that was destroyed during the war. The entire time we were there the Ypres [View Full Entry]

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