Storm European Tour.

 Essen Germany 4th/ 5th /6th of July 2003.

The peewees of 2002 came second in the GB Nationals which entitled them to go to Essen in Germany to play for the European cup.

The team, and indeed the whole club, had been working hard for this weekend. They had organized sponsored skates, Car boot sales, Cake, stalls and general begging in an effort to make sure that the trip to Germany would not be too much of a burden on their parents pockets.

A coach (and driver) had been booked to take us there (and back) through the channel tunnel, through France, Belgium and Germany. We set out at 6 O'clock in the morning, just to make sure that we would hit the M25 at peak time! It was too dark in the channel tunnel to see any of the fish swimming around, but the team didn't seem to mind.

Finger amputees annual outing

Oh how we laughed....

Someone who knows how to celebrate their Birthday in style.

We got to the Hotel to discover that we had the whole of Hotel Jung to ourselves. They had opened the Hotel just for us.

Hotel Jung - An example typical of the Essenesque sensitive use of modern materials in architectural functionalism. (Its a concrete box)

We had the first match at 9:00 in the morning against the skating bears - polar bears at that! But first we had to get there. In theory we were 10 minutes drive from the rink. Bruce, Aldie and John had been and looked around the place the night before, but our coach driver clearly didn't think this was necessary. Instead, he decided that before the tournament, with only an hour and a half to go to face off, he would take us on a tour of scenic Essen.  ¾ of an hour later, we were lost - somewhere near, but basically lost.

Lost in Essen is not a good place to be lost in. Lost and getting late to an international Match is also not a good place to be. Oh we were happy, how lucky we were to have this driver. Having passed the SAME supermarket three times, we decided to get the help of a taxi driver. FOLLOW THAT TAXI We were close, the ice rink was just round the corner.


We arrived to see our opponents coolly and calmly practicing on the rink, while we gently simmered down.

As it happens, the preliminaries delayed the start anyway, but it wasn't a good start for us. The rink was an ice rink, with the ice thawed out and the floor painted white. It was a big venue, and just didn't suit 4-a-side peewee roller hockey.


The Ladies European championships where occurring at the same time. And with Limara and Amy in the GB Ladies team, this gave further reason to give our very

loud support.

Sam Kim gave the drums some welly

Cheeky girls giving their all

A smarter version, but somehow lacking the grit and energy of the cheeky girls...

The lads look on

Local talent scouts...

Saturday we had a shock. The hotel had decided they didn't want to cater for us on the Sunday and wanted us to move out to the Hotel over the road. We certainly didn't fancy that, although the other hotel was better quality than ours, we took up our squatters rights and stayed put. We were given the keys to the Hotel and allowed to fend for ourselves!

Mr Motivator in action

You wouldn't believe that those trousers are all too small for them now...

Josh got Dream team

Presentations

Wiggy the bus driver man.

An Albino on the booze.

The trip back was a magical mystery tour. We had told the driver that we wanted to do a spot of shopping. Obviously,  when we said we wanted to visit a booze hypermarket, what we really meant was that we wanted to visit a shed pretending to be a chocolate factory with piles of booze stacked up in one corner. The fact that the driver was taking backhanders from the shop owners didn't have any thing to do with the detour of course.

Aldie, how about a similar paint job on the van??

- Sorry about the complete lack of any Hockey talk in this item. I'm sure that there was some, but it was such a long time ago. If someone would like to look through the videos that I have and do a blow by blow account, I would appreciate it. Oh, the lads did brilliantly and came fourth by the way. The west coast wasps won.-