As with all of my once-in-a-lifetime trips, I'm no sooner back than I'm thinking of how to do it again. We may as well start planning now, no?
FRANCE 2016
This is looking pretty good already. I'd particularly like to do the south coast - never been to Marseille. Bordeaux to Toulouse to Marseille to Nice? Maybe a camper van convoy? Or gites with swimming pools. Family style, big sprawling group, bring the WAGS and whatever kids might exist by that stage. Football an afterthought to general chaos. Finish up with one or two big nights in Paris.
RUSSIA 2018
This is grizzled boys on tour. Everyone pushing 40, most of us will have probably given up drinking by this stage but we'll go crazy and drink far too much vodka anyway. I'm disappointed to see there are no games played in Vladivostok - I like the idea of watching the first match in Moscow and then spending seven days on the Trans-Siberian, relying on train station kiosk attendants for the scores and manually putting together the tables on napkins. The whole thing will have to be done by train in any event, because A) it's more fun and B) Aeroflot. Moscow and St Petersburg are musts. Kaliningrad looks promising just because when else would you go there. And I reckon Yekaterinburg, just because it's the furthest east - I reckon people there would be happiest to see you. I went through it on the train, it looked OK. I reckon take a train to Russia from the UK as well, maybe stop off in the Baltics.
As I said before, though, I'm only going if they waive visa requirements, or at least get the visa application down to one page. I never want to have to fill that fucker in again.
BONUS: ENGLAND AWAY TO SAN MARINO, SEPTEMBER 5, 2015
I have a crazy friend who is obsessed with the England's qualifying campaigns, more so than their actual tournament performance. As he puts it, qualifying campaigns are more engrossing because there is an absolute (and generally quite reasonable) expectation that England will qualify - they just have to beat a whole bunch of teams who are not as good as them. That's what makes it so perversely, almost morbidly fascinating - you're just watching the team try not to slip on a long series of banana skins. It's a metaphor for a certain type of life - where you're just about holding it together, everything's basically fine, there's no reason for you to really worry, you're perfectly capable of dealing with this, but just a little slip-up will not quite ruin everything, but start to put a lot of pressure on you, etc.
Anyway that's by-the-by - the main thing is, I've always wanted to do an away trip to a European minnow, and San Marino is the next one we play. It would appear to have a gondola. It's in Italy, so in theory you could tack it on to a weeklong hired-cottage WAG-friendly holiday, but I almost think it would be better as a slightly pointless, not-really-value-for-money lads' weekend.
USA 2022...
