This tale is told from my own perspective, which means that it recounts the shenanigans from wednesday and thursday nights before ESIS and some of the bingers arrived. It also means that there are gaps at certain stages where my memory is hazy. And I can never remember the exact order of games or the names of teams we played against, so somebody might have to correct some of this.
Firstly, in response to Clíodhna's queries, the sand was great, the weather was great and there are no new nicknames (unless you count me being called a "sponge" for shotgunning a lift to the water park on Friday night), but plenty of new expressions, the best of which is probably "The Wets".
Anyway, we flew out early on Thursday morning after a sleepless night spent drinking (in some cases smoking, and in one particularly sad case, programming). We had a reasonably uneventful journey over and we arrived in Nantes bright and early for a spot of breakfast (which consisted of beer and cocktails while being serenaded by the sweet music of some weirdo across the river with one of those weird arabian horn thingies) before catching the midday train to Le Pouliguen and the campsite.
Having pitched our tents, some of us napped, others explored the town. Then we decided to go and buy provisions so we went to the local hypermarket and bought a barbecue, an odious lock of meat (most of the weekend was conducted in 'Blaneyspeak (which, to all you uncivilised people out there, is the colourful dialect native to the denizens of Castleblaney in Monaghan (for "denizens of Castleblaney", read "Muck Savages"))) and four 5-litre kegs of Heineken. I believe some of the less carnivorous clittorati bought meat and beer alternatives, but I'm telling the story from my point of view and I'm way too sexist to remember any details about them.
Anyway, we were joined by Thomas from Germany, whom we had met in Mallorca last year and we ate, drank and made merry until the early hours of the morning when we retired to our respective tents and reflected on the experiences of the day, meditated a little, offered up a little prayer to any passing gods and collapsed from a mild case of alcohol poisoning.
On Friday the ESIS crew arrived with the rest of our bingers and the rejoicing was great. To celebrate, further heaps of meat were purchased and consumed and washed down with France's finest Kanterbrau. I can't really remember much of what we did on Friday. We said we were going to go kayaking but we didn't.... I think we just sat around, then headed down to the welcome party on the beach where we drank free wine and ate a meal comprised of a fish (deceased), a loaf of bread (thankfully, there was enough to go round and nobody had to do the loaves and fishes trick) and a tomato.
Saturday morning began with a captains' meeting and a load of sitting around until our first game at 12ish. We played Jacksuns, who had recently won a tournament in Rotterdam, and we lost after initially taking the lead. This game was featured on the cover of the following day's newsletter and the Jacksuns captain claimed that we had scored a few points first because they were disorganised and hadn't warmed up yet (which was odd considering they were doing drills for about 30 mins on the sideline before the game), but once they got their act together they proved who the better team was and they dominated. These words would come back to haunt him two days later. If memory serves, we lost one other game and won one (and this could well be wrong, all these games have blurred into one). Regardless of the nitty-gritty of who won what and who did what to whom, we made a mess of the first day, in fine Binge tradition.
That evening we went to a water park and got up to all sorts of shenanigans on the water slide. The highpoint of the evening was getting about 12 people together and going down the slide backwards in a train formation. Surprisingly, there were no lasting injuries. Later that night we went to a ristorante, got our food on, walked around looking for a party, then basically fucked off home and crashed.
On Sunday we won a few more games, but I really can't remember the details all that well! I think we might have played against Disco Stars that morning, and that being a fun game with good spirit and a fun call... I remember playing against UFO and Gentle, who were two very strong teams, and beating them (The UFO game was particularly exciting and involved some questionable spirit just before the cap). But, as usual, it was too little too late as we were already well into the bottom half.
Sunday night we went to some club in the middle of nowhere. Some of us dressed as penguins, others just wore black and white clothes. ESIS dressed up as mimes (and the concept of the binge going as mime-hunters was postulated by some). We got free dinner and a load of free wine. At one stage myself and somebody who was probably Seamus stole a big 5 litre (or was it more??) box of the stuff and hid it in a yard somewhere. Of course, at that stage we were pretty far gone and couldn't have drank that amount of wine even if we had tried. We played drinking games with Curious Bacon, who are an English team from Leeds. 21 was played unsuccessfully, as was rockbar. Eventually we played a different variation on the rockbar theme which involved West Country speech and was very entertaining as it included a couple of new rules which rockbar is lacking (but which I plan on introducing into it!). For some strange reason, the DJ played a succession of trad Irish tunes and so we had a bit of a Ceili. I discovered that they had whiskey on tap (!!), then Tommy Leitner did another freestyle exhibition and after that the whiskey got the better of me and memory gets hazy... Several people passed out for various lengths of time in various parts of the nightclub, with varying degrees of hilarity. When we returned to the campsite there was some sort of (alcohol-induced) confusion on Pixie's part as to where he lived and I can't really remember much else about the night.
Monday morning saw us lose to XLR8RS because we were so hungover, which was a pity because we definitely could have taken them at any other time of the day. After the match, Seamus went home and we went to eat galettes and drink cider (at least I drank cider!), then we moseyed back to the beach and stuck it to Jacksuns. It was a very hard-fought match in which the Binge was missing two of its strongest players, but we persevered and celebrated by having the hot girl from Jacksuns throw a chocolate cake at Gary's face. It was good to finish on a win, particularly against a team we had already lost to and whom we felt we should have beaten.
There was a lot of sitting around then. Some of us watched ESIS, then went for a stroll, others just sat on their asses and drank beer. The final was watched and beers were consumed (Freezz beezz beat Potion Victims). The awards ceremony was slept through because it was so stunningly boring. The high-point of the awards was when the announcer called us up to get our team photo and he said "All the way from Ballybinge in Ireland... Captain Drinking Binge!".
We then returned to the campsite for showers and sexual harassment (on the part of Gary and Pixie, at least). Later that evening, we drank beer and barbecued (horse meat was consumed for novelty value). The clitoratti and ESIS went to a restaurant, so we played boules, then decided it was gay and played disc golf in the campsite until we were told to shut up and we moved it to the park. ESIS returned just as we finished and further beers were consumed. Some sleeping was done, followed by reveille at 04:30. Tents were packed and then we set off for the train station and many of us managed to get lost on the way. One free train ride later (for those of us who didn't buy return tickets) we were in Nantes, then in the airport, then in Dublin, then on the 16A, then in Santry, then in bed. Now I'm here rambling about the weekend.
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