Right, it's late at night, and despite being disappointed with the result tonight, I've had an incredible week off work, of which I spent Wednesday to Friday down in England. I figured I'd at least get some pictures posted up of the fruits of the (rather expensive) journey down south, as at least I'd get the ball rolling on the write ups. I'll probably do some separate topics on some of these bats, so this will just be a rough overview of the visit.
Started off just before 7am from Glasgow, and headed down to Bradford to pick up
@mycricketgear to go and visit Eclipse All Sports. I've dealt with Hanif a lot over the years, and always said that I'd pay him a visit, which he's always just rolled his eyes at and replied 'Yeah, and pigs will fly, England will win some silverware in football, and Aldred will praise an Asian brand.' (Not quite the words he used, but you get the gist, I had been promising for a long time) Hopped over to Wakefield, and was greeted by Hanif, who was pleased to finally meet a long time regular. Will talk more about the visit some other time, but if I'm after an Asian brand, Hanif has pretty much been my first port of call. I wasn't going to buy anything, but of course, that meant I ended up with 4 new DSCs.
Next up was
@jonny77 Scott Cricket, which was a 20min drive to Leeds. Unfortunately, we couldn't spend too long there, as we had a net booked for 5pm, and our visit to Eclipse had dragged on due to them being well stocked. We had a good discussion, and had a look at Jonny's workshop, which was pretty impressive, given that he hadn't moved in too long ago, and had only just went full time recently! He's a good egg, and we would be visiting again on Friday due to lack of time. I actually left my precious Zak Crawley GN Custom copy with him, as I wanted him to apply his toe protection on it.
I headed off to Chester to meet with
@wilkie113 , and we finished off watching the tense Semi final, checked out some bats and then called it a day, as we would be heading off to Irthlingborough on Thursday morning.
Onto the visit to Robert Pack. I won't say too much about this now, as I won't be able to do the visit much justice, but we had planned to be there from 11am until about 1.30pm, as we'd imagined Rob would have been accommodating. The Pack family being accommodating was an understatement, and we ended up leaving at around 4pm, and despite them being flat out, Rob gave us so much of his time.
@wilkie113 ended up getting his bat made up in front of him, his rehandle and refurb finished up to his preferences, and I ended up with 3 more to the already bloated collection, and some pads and gloves. All in all, a fantastic day out - we hadn't even realised that we were hungry until we left, as we hadn't even had lunch! Maybe I'll just leave the write up like this, as I'd highly recommend booking in a visit yourselves to find out more!
Then on the Friday, IJC was a small drive from Chester, so we went there in the morning, and were greeted by Steve and Connor. It was a short but lovely visit, and I ended up with 2 bats - a Chase R1 and a CA 3000. (We had actually planned to go at 5pm on Thursday, but because our visit to RPC had well overshot, we had to cancel) There were many brands there, as well as a lovely GN Delta, which is Robertsbridge made btw, if anyone wants to check one out. They only opened the showroom about 2 weeks ago, so keep an eye out for when their stock levels rise to pay a visit. Steve was very welcoming, and very pleasant to talk to.
The final stop prior to heading back to Sunny Scotland was Scott, where I spent a good amount of time deciding between the 3 bats I liked the most, while Kev talked Jonny's ear off, and Jonny checked out my kitbag full of bats I brought down. I ended up getting a beaut of a G2 JS170 in the blue livery.
@jonny77 will be getting some willow in this coming week, and I hear he can easily make 2lb 7oz SH bats with 40mm edges and 70mm spines with no concaving. G3 as well. (in case you believe every word I say, the bit about new willow is true, but the G3 40mm edge and 70mm spine at 2.7 is a joke we both share - unless you don't mind like 90mm width bats!)
I'll no doubt have missed something, but it's late and I'm typing this out on my phone - I'll most likely update this topic sometime this week, but I hope it hasn't been too verbose - I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to all these places, and couldn't help but laugh when Wilkie couldn't stop staring at his custom Blueroom as if it was his newborn child haha. But all in all, a great time was had with some quality company. Around 1000 miles were covered, and many smiles and good times were had, be it joking around when netting, talking about bats, tapping up bats or chatting $#!+.
Some extra of the Blueroom/RPC stickers, which are some of my favourites in the market:
And Wilkie's beast of a Custom Pro Grade Blueroom:
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Topic: Chad's cricket gear fuelled journey down south (Read 4995 times)