Early start as we head off for our first visit to Millenium Stadium to see the rugby game between Ireland and Canada. Three trains on the underground before we got to Paddington Station and the 2.5 hour train trip to Cardiff. Everything was well organised going down, the train was packed but we luckily managed to grab some seats. The weather was fantastic in Cardiff although very foggy for most our journey down. The city was buzzing with stalls selling RWC team clothing and memorabilia, face painting, pub's patrons falling out (not literally - yet!) onto the street and just a good vibe. The majority of supports were Irish (in green) with a surprisingly large number of Canadian supporters (in red) and Bruce (in black). As you might expect he did get a number of comments during the day suggesting he was at the wrong venue!

We walked up to Cardiff Castle but did not go inside as we will do this on another visit. We wandered down past the wall of animal heads and into one of the little alleyways for some lunch before going into the stadium. We did not realise Millenium Stadium was a fully roofed stadium.

Our seats were on the 25m line and 7 rows up from the field. Not seats that we would normally pick (they were allocated after our successful ballot) but enabled us to be close to the action and players when they were down our end. The singing by the Irish and chanting by the Canadians was fantastic as we expected. The game was one sided as expected (50-7) but was a better game than the score indicated. The Canadians were unlucky not to get a couple of more tries. Both captains got sin-binned at different times during the game which was a bit unusual in itself.

The organisation after the match to get back to London was not that good. Non existent signage made it difficult to find the right end of the station and once we got there to find the queue for our train was a joke. We heard from others in the queue that it had been known to be a 3 hour wait for the train after matches at the Millenium. If this is true then we were lucky as we only had to wait about 2 hours. Luckily we were near the front of the queue for our train and managed seats. Others were standing for at least another hour before we got to the first of 2 stops back to London. This did not stop the day from being a great day however.