Jellied Moose Nose: Maulerfest

Friday, I hitched a ride up to Fairbanks to pick up my 4Runner, which finally made it to Alaska. The check out process was a total of 5 minutes, look around the vehicle, check the dents and scratches. Nothing new. Good to go. We ran off to lunch at the Food Factory, pretty decent philly cheeses. I boogied back down to Delta to retrieve my camping and rugby stuff then drove on down to Palmer Alaska for Maulerfest, a ten on ten tournament. The drive down was amazingly beautiful, I sang songs the entire way with the sun shining looking forward to a little rugby action. I rolled into Palmer about 9:30 p.m. and found the Matanuska river campground. There were a few tents up, but nobody home yet, so I went shopping. When i came back Dave and his family were back at the site, we were the first ones into camp. Slowly but surely through the night everyone else showed up and tents began to spring up like mushrooms after a fall drizzle. We sat around the fire drinking PBRs and talking shop. We finally started to hit the racks around 1 in the morning just as it was getting dark. Midnight Sun is right.

The first match wasn't until noon, so we decided on breakfast at 9 at the Palmer Hotel. We had 24 bodies for breakfast. The portions were huge. Robbie easily had the largest breakfast including corned beef hash and reindeer sausage, something like four 6" pieces for a serving. I had (not green) eggs and ham and 1 pancake, too afraid it would all come up post haste once I started running. We filled 3 tables and 2 booths to overflowing and made a spectacle for the locals and a tip machine for our waitress who was excellent. She was on top of it for sure. Then we headed to the pitch, which coincidentally was next door to the campground, oh how convenient.

The pitch had thick soft grass all over. Reminded me of Savannah in the park, must be the costal climate, all that moisture. Soft grass is a plus, it makes the tackles more bearable. We played 3 matches, 20 minutes a piece. We beat BirdCreek pretty handily 5 trys to none. We came out ready to play and moving well. Then we had a 3 hour break in the cool air. By the second match I was stiff as a board and moving slow. At the beginning of the match, an islander nailed me hard, picked me up and did a driving tackle into the ground, he got a penalty but I was moving even slower after that point and I think the hit put the mojo on the guys because we were all a little slow to react. The second half against the Tbirds (all samoan) we had found our legs and put up 2 trys and kept them to 1 score but they had slowed their pace as well. They walked away with the win though. The third match was a face-off with Kenai, who was borrowing some guys from other teams. We came out the gate hard and scored quickly then scored another pull ahead try, but Kenai found their rythm and early in the second half we were tied. Then in the final minutes they rolled us with a downhill try to creep ahead and held it for the win. It was a tough loss because we beat ourselves more than anything with too much individual effort and turnovers. Our lack of group playing time was evident. My legs felt great by this time by my spirits kept dropping whenever we'd be pushing forward well then an errant pass out would end up in a turnover 20 meters behind the ground we'd just gained. I did have my share of screw ups without a doubt, knocked on a penalty ruck, forward pass on a penalty run, kicked the ball away on a breakaway run. Ugh.