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Sometimes travelling can offer a mixed bag of highs and lows. There are times when your expectations are met with underwhelming experiences, and then there are times when you stumble into the experience of a lifetime. Our trip to London in the past 2 days has definitely been the latter.

When we planned this trip we realized that it would coincide with the 2022 Wimbledon tournament so we thought we’d start our vacation in London to try our luck at getting on the grounds. The main 3 courts are always sold via a lottery system, but you can “queue” to enter the grounds where you can watch any of the other matches that are going on during the day at no extra charge. If you’re at the front of the queue you can purchase tickets to the main courts as they hold back a small amount of tickets for a lucky 500 or so. We had originally planned to spend our first day in London taking it easy. Then on day two the plan was to get up early in the morning (3 am) and join the queue of people tenting outside the grounds in order to get first crack at tickets. To be honest, I wasn’t sure the odds were in our favour to secure the coveted centre court passes and I was thinking it was going to be a miserable experience. However, it is on our bucket list to see some grand slam tennis so I was going to suck it up and endure.

On day 1 we decided to walk over to the grounds just to get a lay of the land for our early line up the next morning. As we followed the signs for the queue, we quickly realized that there was no queue at all and we were able to get in to the grounds right then and there.

After walking around the grounds for a while, we headed straight for Henman Hill. We claimed a spot on the grass and soaked in the atmosphere with a Pimm’s in hand.

One of the highlights of our day was hearing the crowd erupt during a a pre-game ceremony where they revealed past Wimbledon champions were at the centre court match. The biggest surprise was that Roger Federer was among them.

For the rest of the day we went to match after match. We got to see some big names, some even walked by us on their way to the courts.

We were running on 2.5 hours of sleep from the airplane ride and time change but we managed to stay until the sun went down. When we got back to our AirBnB we changed our plans for the next day. We elected to sleep until 7 and get up to join the queue. We were confident that we would be able to get on the grounds.

Once we got in, we headed straight to the ticket resale line to wait for our chance to get centre court tickets. This was a risky move but Wimbledon has a system where they resell tickets once people leave. Each ticket costs 15 pounds and it all goes to charity. We were numbers 72 and 73 and were told our odds were good. They were right because 5.5 hours later we were in the possession of 2 centre court tickets!

First up, Paula Badosa vs Simona Halep.

I’m a huge Badosa fan so I was sad to see her lose, but it was amazing to see her play.

The next match featured one of the tennis GOATs, Rafael Nadal vs Botic van de Zandschulp.

When we planned on attending Wimbledon we weren’t sure if we would even be able to get on the grounds, let alone get to see Nadal play a prime time match. We feel like we have cashed in some serious travel karma. Game. Set. Match. robodawno.