After a quiet Friday night at home, Uns and myself spent Saturday morning getting the house ready for Tony and Teresa's arrival. Once done, I left Uns and headed off to Twickenham for the SA vs Wales quarter final game. After meeting Duncs at the station, we grabbed some food and beers at Waitrose then headed over to the stadium. Since we were there in good time, we landed up meeting up with Claire and Jamie who were also there and had their seats fairly close to where Duncs and I were sitting. After a quick chat and beer with them we headed to our seats in time for the anthems and kickoff. I expected it to be a good game but wasn't quite ready for one of the most stressful and tense games of the tournament. The crowd and support was unbelievable, especially the moment that Fourie Du Preez dived over the try line to put the Boks ahead by 4 points. Really was a brilliant game with the final score being 23 - 19 to the Boks!

After the game we met up with a few of Duncs' mates who had hospitality tickets and managed to organise for us to get in there for the evening, where they were serving drinks and snacks and had a few ex-international rugby players doing talks up on stage. Once they started to close up, we left and Duncs headed home and I made my way out to Mayfair to the Burlington Arms for JP's 40th which was already in full swing. By then I had mostly lost my voice so any attempt at karaoke was fairly awful, well, more so than usual for me :) But good to see everyone there and I decided to leave before they moved on, mainly because I knew I had an early start yesterday morning.

Yesterday's alarm going off at 6am was THE worst imaginable sound after a big Saturday :( I certainly wasn't a fan of the rugby then! After struggling to get ready, myself, Una, Tony and Teresa headed off to Paddington, getting there in good time to avoid the London to Cardiff train madness of the previous weeks. We queued for over an hour but managed to get on a train and each get a seat, which was an absolute lifesaver for me! After a couple of hours we got to Cardiff and met up with Simon, Charlene and their friends at Locke and Remedy which was fairly central. After a Bloody Mary, a pint and some breakfast there I started feeling a bit more chipper and ready for the rest of the day!

From there we headed over to the stadium, taking forever to get through security where they (stupidly) only had one queue for bag search which took forever. We did however make it to our seats in time, but only just. As it turned out, James Egan was sitting just a few rows in front of us! We knew he would be at the game, we just didn't expect him to be right where we were!

Unfortunately the game didn't quite turn out as expected with Argentina taking the lead quite early on and holding that lead until the end, winning by 43 points to 20. Obviously I'd have preferred an Irish win, along with the majority of the stadium, but fair play to the Argies, just better on the day I reckon.

After the game we stopped in at The Gatekeeper pub to watch the Australia vs Scotland game which had an absolutely incredible atmosphere with Scotland almost taking the win from the Aussies. Needless to say almost everyone in the pub was 100% behind Scotland but they just couldn't finish at the end, with Australia winning by 35 points to Scotland's 34... so close!

After the game we met back up with Tony and Teresa and caught the train back to London, getting home around half 10 last night, completely knackered from a massive weekend. Looking forward to making it through the day today and getting home at a reasonable time tonight and just chilling out with a takeaway and a movie. Could do with that after this past weekend :)