After some nine months of planning and anticipation; Ripon RUFC embarked on yet another European end of season celebratory outing, this time to Lloret de Mar in North Eastern Spain’s original package holiday destination. Thanks to the brilliant administrative skills of Matt “Clarky Snr” Clark in getting everything sorted from flights, transfers, accommodation and playing matters amongst myriad other things and the perennial tour organising support of Fletch, Rossco and Barks, this was another memorable experience, hopefully for all the right reasons. The contributions of many others too numerous to mention, including the loyal and committed sponsors were also much appreciated and all together, with the club fund raising events; enabled another adventure to pastures new for The Blues and introduced no less that seven newcomers to the throng of seasoned campaigners.

What follows, respecting the knightly code of “what goes on tour, stays on tour”, is a summary of highlights and lowlights experienced in the spirit of Ripon RUFC forging links of peace and camaraderie wherever they go, home or away. It also aims to protect the innocent, particularly when certain individuals (who shall remain nameless) found themselves at the mercy of kangaroo courts, facing trumped up and unreasonable charges and got away with it. Others were less fortunate but more of that later… This also aims to demonstrate the commitment of the club to extend the love, sportsmanship and goodwill of Ripon wherever its players go, in promoting the values of our glorious game. It also aims to demonstrate that the truth should never get in the way of a good story.

And finally… this article is a work of fiction. Some names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious or comedic manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events may be purely coincidental.

No sooner had the touring party assembled at Leeds Bradford than it became clear this was not so much a rugby trip as a mass relocation of chaos. Thirty men of all ages, shapes and levels of structural integrity shuffled through Departures with the swagger of an army and the planning standards of a stag do. There were senior 1st XV lads still clinging to the idea this might be a serious sporting venture, tour veterans held together by tape, nostalgia and ibuprofen, and a few front-row antiques whose natural habitat was clearly a plastic chair in the shade with a pint and a grievance. Even before take-off, the squad looked less like athletes abroad and more like a travelling case study in poor judgement. Nor will we mention the last gasp efforts made by a conspicuous late-comer, whose appearance was solely due to the grace (and patience) of another tourist’s mum. No names, no pack drill!

The flight itself was mercifully short, which was good news for the cabin crew and even better news for Spain. Spirits were high on landing, though this may have had less to do with Mediterranean excitement and more to do with the false belief that the hardest part of the day was over. It was not. Awaiting us was the transfer to the Hotel Montevista Hawai, a name that promised tropical glamour but in reality, delivered a brutally vertical lesson in humility. Perched at the top of a hill seemingly visible from space, the place demanded that every arrival drag suitcase, kitbag and fading dignity uphill in the sort of heat normally reserved for punishment in the Old Testament. By the time the last man reached reception, the squad had already suffered more than in most pre-season sessions.

Naturally, a strategic review was required, and after extensive fieldwork it was decided that the true operational headquarters of the tour would not be the hotel at all, but two beach bars back at the bottom of the hill. Foresight might also have envisaged the convenience of a beachfront hotel but then beggars can’t be choosers. These bars The Tuna and Solara respectively, became our twin fortresses of nonsense, where men baked gently in the Costa Brava sun, conducted advanced hydration programmes and spoke with increasing confidence about the rugby to come. From these sacred outposts came the usual touring promises: we’d keep it sensible, manage the heat, rotate the squad, play territory, and under no circumstances get dragged into silliness. This was all complete rubbish, of course, but it sounded magnificent at the time, especially after a second pint and with sand in places most men didn’t even know they had places.

Then came the rugby itself, because however much effort had gone into avoiding it, the schedule remained stubbornly committed to two actual matches. Both required a two-hour bus trip into punishing heat, a logistical ordeal that turned the squad from rowdy holidaymakers into a cohort of wilted men staring silently into the middle distance. On arrival, our noble touring army was met by opposition who looked fitter, sharper and alarmingly familiar with the concept of preparation. We, by contrast, resembled a wandering invitational side assembled from a pub raffle: red-faced, creaking and carrying the unmistakable air of men who had mistaken enthusiasm for conditioning. Both games were lost to superior opponents, and fairly comprehensively at that, but there was no disgrace in it. Great tours are not measured in points scored or tackles made. They are measured in endurance, nonsense, recovery stories and the sheer heroic refusal of 30 men to learn anything from experience.

If the beach bars had already established themselves as the spiritual home of the tour, they truly came into their own once the rugby damage had been done. There, with salt on the skin, sand in the socks amongst other places and defeat still clinging to the soul, the squad regrouped in the only way tourists know how: by loudly rewriting history over cold drinks. Suddenly, missed tackles became unlucky slips, missed chances became “if the bounce had gone our way,” and 30 - point beatings were spoken about in the tones usually reserved for noble wartime retreats. Every table became a selection meeting, every round a tactical debrief, and every storyteller a decorated veteran of the Costa Brava campaign.

As with all great tours, the cast of characters quickly revealed themselves. There was the fitness lad, bronzed and annoyingly functional, who insisted on stretching on the beach like he was preparing for an Olympic final rather than another afternoon of self-inflicted dehydration. There was the senior prop, shirtless by breakfast and moving with the dignified roll of a retired pirate, who could not climb the hotel hill without stopping twice but somehow never seemed too tired to reach the bar. There was the one who packed as if fleeing the country, lugging enough kit for a month-long expedition but wearing the same pair of shorts for three straight days. And there was, inevitably, the self-appointed social secretary: part diplomat, part menace, part mobile loudspeaker, forever promising everyone ‘one quiet one’ before steering the entire party toward fresh disorder.

Nightlife in Lloret did not so much happen to the squad as engulf it. Once fed and briefly revived, men who had spent the afternoon cramping in direct sunlight rediscovered their second wind with deeply suspicious speed. Small groups broke away on missions of dubious value and somehow always re-emerged larger, louder and less trustworthy than before. At least one man vanished for an hour and returned with a hat nobody remembered him owning. Another became completely committed to a conversation with strangers despite possessing only three usable words of Spanish, none of them helpful. The beach bars, meanwhile, continued to serve as command posts for operations that grew less coherent by the minute, until the whole tour felt like a military campaign being run by men who had lost the map, ignored the orders and elected to invade a sangria bucket instead.

Morning, when it came, was less a time of day and more a reckoning. Men emerged from rooms in various states of ruin, blinking into the daylight like survivors of a very specific sort of shipwreck. Limbs had stiffened, voices had gone, and there was a general sense across the squad that several personal decisions required neither replay nor discussion. The hill back from the beach, already a hateful piece of geography, now assumed the status of a pilgrimage route for the broken. Every ascent was slow, sweaty and accompanied by the kind of groaning normally heard in a casualty department. Yet somehow, even in this condition, the post-match review remained buoyant. Because while bodies were failing and memories had become suspiciously selective, morale was still intact — if only because nobody was physically capable of caring about the score anymore, nor indeed remembering much about what had occurred previously.

And that, in the end, is what rugby tours are really about. Not the results, which fade almost instantly, nor the quality of the rugby, which on trips like this is usually somewhere between patchy and medically unwise. They are about the glorious, ridiculous business of throwing together 30 men with too much confidence, not enough flexibility and an industrial commitment to nonsense, then seeing what survives sun, sand, sea or random appendages, buses, beer and each other. Lloret de Mar gave us superior opposition, savage heat, a hill that should have come with a warning label, and two beach bars that deserve some sort of civic honour. It also gave us exactly what every proper tour should: fresh legends, unreliable witnesses, exaggerated heroics and the comforting knowledge that while nobody may remember the score, everyone will remember who needed a sit-down halfway up the hill.