In case you’ve been out of the country or have had your eyes and ears shut these past few weeks, London has hosted the 2012 Olympic Games and what a fortnight it has been. The coverage has been pretty immense and both through the television and radio waves and we have been hooked. Inspire a Generation…Inspire Roscoe and Rutter too!

We were lucky enough to get our hands on some Olympic tickets for London 2012 thanks to the Roscoe parents putting in a successful bid for the first night of Track and Field and we also picked up some tickets for the Women’s Team Foil Fencing event taking place at the Excel Arena.

It has to be said that we loved our Olympic experience. Starting with the fencing, which neither of us have any prior knowledge of we just liked the thought of getting to one of the lesser known Olympic sports. En-route we were greeted with Thai tourists eagerly anticipating one of their top table tennis players, always drawn to a group shot we couldn’t resist sneaking one there and then.

In the Excel arena Boxing, Judo, Table Tennis and Badminton were all taking place with more events going on there in the second week of action. Within the fencing competition we saw lots of competitive action too and Team GB were out in force attempting to go through the rounds. Fencing is tough to follow but we could tell who were the favorites  through the rounds with Italy and France having the most International support in the crowd. Happening in the Excel arena that day also saw an epic Judo silver medal from Team GB’s Gemma Gibbons, so there was a lot of buzz at Excel throughout.

The next day we were so excited to be taking our turn at the Olympic Athletics Stadium accompanied by Jan and Den (Helen’s parents). We’d been staying in Bromley for a few days and were very pleased with the transport links, the underground ran smoothly all around central London and the free Zone 1-9 railcards which came with the tickets were well used. For our final night we opted to camp with the parents out in Theydon Bois. A campground that is right next to the train station and a 25 minute ride to the Olympic Park. Perfect.

Once we were in the Olympic Park we were greeted by a pretty slick security procedure and thousands of people doing the same, so another thumbs up on that side of things too. The amount of people in the park was amazing, quite overwhelming and the buzz was so exciting. We managed to explore the park pretty well walking towards and around many of the other sporting venues finishing our stroll in Park Live where a large double sided screen attracted even more thousands of people checking out the action in the velodrome. For some people this was where they would watch the action from. Perhaps our biggest criticism about the park was that they could have done with more screens around as there were big queues for getting into Park Live, which at peak times operated on a one-in-one-out basis.

At 6pm we made our way to our seats in the Olympic Stadium, spotting Catherine Merry on the way in doing her bit for Five Live Sport. We were quite high up in the stadium with seats pretty much opposite the 100m finish. After the initial excitement and photographs of us in there surrounded by nearly 80,000 others doing the same we started to enjoy the action. Greg Rutherford was going in the long jump qualifying, little did we know we were watching a champion in the making and also Jess Ennis competed in both the shot put and 200m as part of her Olympic winning performance. It was all quite overwhelming at times and Helen had to fight back a few tears each time the roars from the crowd got behind a home athlete, especially Ennis, she is a little star!

We also saw the 100m qualifying rounds which saw race after race go under 11 seconds, fast!! The women’s discus qualifying took place and the men’s shot put final saw the heavy weights in action with the finishing event being the light-weights in the women’s 10,000m final. Never has a stadium applauded such an event on the first night of action. Jan and Den were in Athens and Beijing and were astounded by the support.

Our biggest annoyance was the use of music whilst competitors were trying to achieve their physical peak performance. Music pumping straight into the audience was just a little too much at times when trying to concentrate on a certain event. We appreciate that they were appealing to the mass audience who want to see a show, and perhaps this compensated a little for the price of tickets…who knows, surely the athletic performance is a show enough in itself? And why Ben Sheppard was there…it’s not X-Factor, this is the Olympic Games!

Taking this aside we were thrilled with our Olympic experience and wanted to go again and again to support the athletes from around the world, competing at the highest level. This is something to be admired and we felt proud that the British pulled off a fantastic games, a wonderful Olympic Park and look at where we finished on the medal table, fourth, wow! Not bad for a country of 60 million!

In September we’re back in the Olympic Stadium for the Paralympic closing ceremony and in between we may try to sneak in a few tickets for Paralympic action, which is set to have more of a following than in any other Paralympic Games in history.

We woke up to sunshine and photographed the sun rising across the lake, pretty idyllic so far! Packing up was easy as the tent is very small and quick to take up and down, so this helped us speed up somewhat before making our way to the north-westerly point of the peninsula. The weather got greyer and greyer as we made our way in the direction of Neah Bay.

As we were pretty early we made our first point of call the Native American Cape Flattery Museum as it had been mentioned in the Lonely Planet and sounded pretty interesting. Opening at 10am the museum is located just before Neah Bay and we were pleasantly surprised by how much we enjoyed it! The place is dated (as are a lot of things in the area) but it does the history of the tribal region justice, housing totem poles, whale catching boats, and all original artifacts found from Native American villages buried under mudslides. It’s worth a visit if you’re in the area.

As is Cape Flattery, the most north-western point of the lower 48 states! Fact! ha! The weather was still foggy and misty but the hike through the forest and out to the viewing places was really cool, very eerie indeed! Good misty and atmospheric views out to rocks and the wild sea, on a clear day you can see Vancouver Island, on this day we struggled to see the small island only 150 meters away!

Moving further down the peninsula we drove to another lake to camp for the night at Lake Ozette. There were only 17 sites here so we managed to pick one that was perhaps one of the largest and we were most definitely the smallest tent! Naughty! But we all pay the same! So we had some lunch and got a few maps and ideas for a hike going from the ranger station to the coast, we chose to do a 6 mile round trip hike going along the lower boardwalk. We were pretty speedy there and spent some time at the wild coast taking in the   washed up logs and rocky terrain. Its a pretty wild coast! Fortunately for us it wasn’t too wild but all the evidence displays what this place is like in the winter.

Back at the campsite we managed to do a little bit of work and cooked up yet another camp meal, to this point we were of course still excited about what our next meal would be! The Ozette campground was our favourite in the region, really beautiful and only cost $12. No shower though but the location and scenery make up for that!

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f/2.0, Leica 90mm f/2.8, Zeiss 18mm f/4 ZM processed in Lightroom 3)

We arranged to meet Jen who we’d met on the hike at the weekend at midday outside the ticket office area of the Aquatics centre in the Olympic park. It was a really foggy/polluted day so we didn’t have great weather for photographing the Birds Nest and the Water cube, but it’s still a worth while thing to do if you have time in the city. The Birds Nest is an amazing structure and certainly draws in the sightseers for a spot of photo time. We spent around half an hour or so walking around the site before making our way to the ticket area for the Water Cube. We had planned to do a swim with Jen in the Olympic pool but when you start enquiring about tickets it goes a little like this: Entrance only: 50 RMB. Swim in training pool: 70 RMB. Water park: 200 RMB.

So if you want to swim it’s for 2.5 hours only, and it’s not the Olympic pool itself it is the warm up pool. The water park is unlimited in one entry so you can spend the whole day there but you can’t use the same ticket if you want to swim. So our dilemma was should we swim…in a cold pool, buy goggles (which takes it up to around 200RMB) and only have two hours or so? Or should we have a really good laugh, go on the slides, wavepool, yes it’s over our budget but we thought we would have loads of fun! So what did we do? Well of course we wanted to have fun, and we managed to persuade Jen to do the same. It’s an interesting experience being in the water park area, it’s not quite warm enough for you to feel fully comfortable in your swim suit and many of the locals don’t really like swimming, so you tend to see people in lifejackets a lot. The slides weren’t being used so we soon started getting ourselves onto the slides and Dave went for the scariest looking one first. A slide that both Helen and Jen thought they wouldn’t end up doing!

It has a vertical drop of around 40 foot, loops around and then splashes you out at the bottom. A capsule at the top of the slide holds you in place and a countdown begins. “3, 2, 1″ and the trap door opens and away you go. Pretty scary stuff but a real thrill. Helen and Jen were unsure and took some gentle persuading but eventually they climbed the stairs and took the plunge. Both loving it, Jen even went twice! Another favourite was The Tornado which places you in a large rubber ring two persons at a time and sends you thundering into a big bowl, lots and lots of screams and laughs by everyone.

After spending a good few hours inside the water park we headed off for some food before our Tai-Chi beginners class. We stopped by at Grandma’s Kitchen and to our dismay we realised that it was Western/American food, ooops, although Jen felt very at home and we enjoyed some American grub. After a meander through the local Hutong we headed to “The Hutong” cultural centre and began our lesson in the art of Tai-Chi. This was with Eric who was very keen to educate us about the history and tradition of Tai-Chi and what benefits it can bring to your life. We only practised for around 30 minutes out of the whole hour dedicated to the class so we left feeling a little disappointed and cold. We did go away with a better understanding of the martial art though and all of us are keen to explore it further.

It was time to say goodbye to Jen but we did have plans to meet again for some bargain shopping the following week. We’d had a really fun day and would like to thank Jen for hanging out with us, I think we all felt a little younger and satisfied with our brave efforts of going down the deadly red slide!

The following day we were leaving on an overnight train to Xian so we had planned to catch up on washing, buying some food for our trip and packing.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)