Spring Tour 1999

This year's Spring Tour was a little shorter than in the past but we covered over 3000 km and visited 11 teams in 5 countries. Our theme seemed to be France and the French toll roads as we spent nearly half the tour paying for the use of the road we were driving on. Some last minute cancellations lead to days off in Paris (along with a broken window, plenty of stolen items, and a great van drop off story at Charles de Gaulle Airport) and Lyon, and crazy all night drives from Paris to Bordeaux and Bordeaux to Sete. We almost took a last minute detour to Barcelona as well.Thank goodness there was good weather for most of the journey and that France has plenty of cheap red wine to go around.

We got back to the routine of daily matches once we hit Switzerland and carried it right through to the end of the tour with visits to, among others, the beautiful cities of Innsbruck, Austria, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany. The crime of the tour is either that we missed Marianplatz and the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, or that we made poor Chris Kosty and Chris Tischler drive all the way to M¸nster from the match that night (6 hours from midnight to 6am)- I'm not sure which was worse.

It is notable that we had our first UK participant (Steven Fee) and this tour marked the first time that we risked taking 2 Canadians on the same trip (Popper and Lenny); good choices both of them. Perhaps more notable is the fact that this tour had an equal amount of Easties and Westies (4 to 4) but only after the late arrival of Mr. Donny Harris. It was actually 3-4 for the first few days!

In any case, a good time was had by all and we met many new teams to sell players to down the road. Time to prepare for the Summer Tour now I guess.

For those interested in joining the Summer Tour (August 18, 1999) please see the Summer Tour section on the site and/or contact us at bringitusa@aol.com