Las Vegas Sevens Rugby

This is USA team and South Africa

He looks good... right??

Last October, I got an email about the rugby sevens that was going to be coming to Las Vegas in 2010. Clint had talked about going to a tournament one day so I decided spur of the moment to buy tickets. I bought two tickets for the Feb 2010 two day tournament in a great section of the Sam Boyd stadium in Vegas. I was so excited ALL day thinking about his reaction when I told him. I wasn't sure if I was going to give it to him for his Birthday in November or if I could wait all the way until Christmas. I had also ordered two sweatshirts so I'd have something fun to wrap up. Well... I was SO excited, that I told Clint I had a special secret that HE would be so excited about. While I was at work, he got on the computer and checked my "history" and saw information about the rugby, so he figured it out! It really was for the best because I'm horrible at keeping great secrets like that.

So... a few weeks ago we flew from Pasco to Vegas for the weekend of rugby fun. The older kids stayed home and had friends over, but the younger ones went to stay with friends while we were gone. We left on a Friday night and came back Monday. I'm really not a Vegas fan... but the rugby was great. Basically, it was teams from around the world. They play 7 players on a side and each game is 20 minutes long. They play brackets so by the last day, there's an overall winner. All the teams go around the world doing this... getting points for their play in each location. New Zealand ended up going all the way to the final game and lost against Samoa. They were still number one in the overall ranking though.

Half the fun was the crowd. Everyone was CRAZY!! We were sitting by a group from L.A. but originally from South Africa and a couple of guys right next to us that flew over from England. Rugby is pretty much a drinking sport, so everyone was drinking non-stop from 11am to 8pm and so you can imagine what people were like by the end. Not sure what they thought about our non-drinking selves!! I would have thought 9 hours of rugby for 2 days would have been boring, but it was non-stop fun. A shuttle took us from the hotel to the stadium each day, so we didn't even bother getting a rental. Our hotel had some nice food and on Valentines Day, I had a nice steak and lobster dinner. Yum! I'm hoping we can go again next year and talk some New Zealand relatives into coming over for it as well!!

Our South African crazy friends...

Our English friends... who wanted to set up a house swap between Washington and England... ummm, maybe NOT!