188/365 : So Very Cold!

Where do I start...

The first two hours were not so bad. It did not even feel that cold... and then it hit.

It never rained (thank goodness) but boy was it cold. The above picture was taken at around 1:30am. In fact it was taken with my mobile phone because I was too cold to dig my camera out of my purse. Andy had gone to the car to try to warm up a little bit and to try to get a little sleep. He did warm up a little but did not manage to fall asleep.

I ended up going to the car at around 2:00am. I did not want to just keep running the car so I did not even turn it on but it was way warmer then what it was outside already. I set the alarm on my phone for 4:00am in hopes that I would fall asleep. Well... I did fall asleep but it was only for about an hour. I woke up with my body shaking because of the cold. Have you ever had that uncontrollable shaking when you were so cold? Well I had it and it was bad.

I ended up staying in the car until around 4:00am and then I went back out to the line so that Andy could go back in car, which he did.

Then at around 5:30 or so he came back out so we could switch again. At this point I had to use the bathroom SO bad! But unlike a man I could not just run to the back of the car park to take care of it. I sat in the car until 6:30 and decided to go walk up County Road to see if there was a cafe open. I ended up finding a McDonalds that was open so I took care of business and then waited in the rather long line so that I could get something for us to eat for breakfast. Turned out that quite a few people from the line had the same idea as what I had. On a positive note I have never been a fan of English sausage... but the sausage patties at McDonalds taste exactly the same as in the US which was a very nice surprise!

When I made it back to the line Andy was already packing up the chairs because it was around 7:15. He took everything back to the car and we ate breakfast standing up.

They ended up opening up the doors to Goodison Park so that the very long line that was now behind us could wind in and out the walkway area inside to get them off the sidewalks outside. As we sat there watching them all walk past we realized that the cold and waiting was well worth it! There had to be at least a 2,000 people if not more behind us... they will be there for hours in line. Granted they will be a lot warmer then what we were but we had to be at work at 1:30pm so waiting in line that long would not have been an option.

The windows opened up at 8:00am sharp, we made our way up when it was our turn, we handed over £49.00 for our two tickets (£24.50/each) and we were on our way at around 8:25am. Easy peasy.

Do I want to ever have to do this again? NO Is this why we signed up for the Auto Cup Scheme when we got our season tickets for next season? YES Was 10.5 hours in a freezing cold line worth it? YES YES YES!

We planned our trip to London around getting these tickets to the Semi-Final FA Cup at Wembley... if we did not get them we were going to still go down to Wembley that day so that we could watch the match from a pub outside but that was always going to be second best. Now we are going to be there in the stands watching! YAY!

We ended up making it back into Westhoughton at 9:10am. We fell asleep alsmost immediatly and did not wake up until 11:30am. We worked until 9:30pm and then went right back to sleep!