My first World Cup was Italia ‘90 and I’ve been to every tournament since then except for 2002, so going to Russia was always on the cards.
There’s a group of three of us who go to every tournament and almost every game home and away, so we made our initial plans quite early for this one.
We’ve booked two outbound flights and on the way back we’ve got three different sets of flights booked. With our air miles, you can then cancel, so it depends when we play first and last on which we get. You have to get in there quick to book them, but we managed.
We’ve also done quite a bit of research on all the different routes once we get to Moscow, as we have to think about how we get to anywhere else, whether it’s driving, trains or planes.
I’m happy to go anywhere and it’s nice to see new places and while we fly into Moscow, we're not planning to base ourselves there aside from a few days around travelling but I wouldn't mind playing a game there too.
In terms of the cities, I wouldn’t mind seeing St. Petersburg so hopefully there’s an opportunity to do that. I’d also like to see Volgograd, as that is the old Stalingrad so it could be quite interesting.
I made the decision last year that I wanted to go to the World Cup in Russia.
I first joined the England Supporters Travel Club in 2014 at the start of this cycle, so this will be my first World Cup as a member.
I went to the Euros two years ago and I’ve just carried on from there so I think I was always going to go to the next World Cup.
A lot of people have said they didn’t want to go to Russia, but that didn’t apply to me. For the Euros in France, I did all of my planning before the draw but for this one, due to the distances involved in Russia, I haven’t made any exact plans yet but I’m hoping to do shorter trips to more places this time.
From all of the venues in Russia, there are two that I’d most like to see us play at…St Petersburg is somewhere I’ve always wanted to go and obviously Moscow as well, for the venue, so hopefully we’ll be there for the final!
But I’d quite like to visit as many as possible really. Obviously we can’t go to all of them and some are quite far apart but that's part of it and I'm looking forward to the summer.
If you fancy supporting the Three Lions in Russia next summer, then your first step is to become a member of the England Supporters Club or Travel Club, like Martin and Kunal. Click here for more details.
