APAT Newcastle: Friday, 22nd April 2011
"Wales Take The Gold and Laxie Gets Medal"
I wake up relatively early and it's colder than I expected after yesterday's sun. My hands are frozen and I can't get the heating to come on so I burrow back under the covers for a while.
Eventually, though I have to get up and do a little light surfing before a wash and brush up and heading out for a late breakfast.
I give the Union Rooms a swerve as I can't be sure they'll actually have any food and head over to The Mile Castle.
Nice big place and a huge brekky for £4.10 and free Wi-Fi to boot. I'm tucking in when I get a text from Ger asking if I've eaten yet but when I text back to tell him where I am it seems that they've already gone over to the Union Rooms.hey ho.
Once I finish breakfast and my first pint I'm ready for another before heading over to the casino.unfortunately this where the 2nd Wetherspoons lost my vote. I wait an age to get served while the bar staff shuffle up and down making cups of coffee for other patrons. Why on earth can't tea and coffee be handled by the kitchen?
Whatever, I eventually run out of patience and decide to give the Wetherspoons in the Gate, The Keel Row a shot. I climb the hill once again and make my way in. Apart from the remains of a stag party finishing up the drinks it's pretty quiet and I get my second drink in short order. Nothing particularly remarkable about the place but insofar as it's inside the Gate complex I think I'll use this as my breakfast spot.
Leigh and James make an appearance and we chat about the usual stuff, as you do, before we head up to Aspers where, not surprisingly, Tighty is already hard at work having done a full day's work before we arrived.
They're still having internet issues so Richard is quite happy that I've now arrived with pretty reliable WI-Fi to use.
Although I jump into the updating thing again, we have a lot of Head's Up matches to get through and so I'm asked to lend a hand with the dealing. We have four dealers but with me and James lending a hand we can rattle through six at a time using 3 clocks...or in my case, timer on my phone.
This leaves Leigh and Tighty free to update, lend a hand with TD duties or swap in and out with me and James as required.
I think we ran through the HU matches in about 3.5 hours and we slipped in a break before the final MTT was called. The MTT was going to be the decider for the Home International competition so it was all to play for going in.
I wasn't required to deal so I was able to slip back into updating again...Tighty seemed distracted by Michelle, the dolly dealer..but then he's easily distracted by a pretty face.
During a break I order some food, just some chips and onion rings but when the rings arrive they are massive.a good 4 inches in diameter.and bloody tasty too. They're also rather oily, meaning that I keep leaving fingerprints on my keyboard which I have to keep wiping down before I can type an update.
One thing I forget to mention from the post of yesterday's action was the degenerate side bets the updaters had. It was £4 -£5 a round and we'd basically have last longer picks or team bets. I think I won only one round and Leigh, I think, lost them all. Overall, I believe James Barber picked up most of the loose cash.
If you were there or following the update thread you know what a magnificent job the Wales A team did in getting all four team members to the final table of the MTT but, as I recall, the first place was decided before that happened. However, the 2nd and 3rd places were still to be decided and it came down to a nail-biter in the end and, somehow, Ireland A have snatched 3rd place and "Laxie has medal".with a lot of assistance.
Frankly, I can't recall much of the aftermath at this point; it's all a little muddled in my head with the rest of the long weekend. I think I had a couple more beers before heading back to the hotel about 1am. Seems right.
