Well, what can I say? As we both live "Down Under", Jarrod and I probably live closer to each other than we do to the many other members on the forum that we have each met through our passion for IWC and membership of this forum but that small bit of ocean that separates New Zealand from Australia and competing travel plans has meant that despite trying for a number of years, we have never managed to get the moons to align for a GTG until yesterday!
After trying for a number of years to get our travel plans to sync up, I finally got a message from Jarrod the other day via another tread on here that he would be visiting Sydney so we quickly got our dates sorted out and locked in a GTG for Sunday.
Despite being the middle of winter, Sydney turned on the weather for the weekend with temperatures hovering in the mid 20's (celsius) and what better weather than to meet up with Jarrod and Steff at Doyles at Watson Bay for lunch . We all met up at 12:30 and had a great lunch and after some quick introductions the talk quickly turned to watches and IWC. Being a bit of a veteran of the IWC GTG I packed my watches with me and after admiring Jarrod's ceramic Pilot Perpetual I started getting mine out at which point we all realised that Jarrod had made a rookie mistake - he had not brought his watch collection with him (and you would think based on all the posts on here that Jarrod was a seasoned veteran of the GTG!) so after enjoying lunch and some length watch-chat we decided to head back into the city to a bar for a drink which would also give Jarrod the chance to swing by the hotel and grab his collection.
After a false start in one bar we finally found a place to sit enjoy a beer and continue our chat about watches with the added benefit of having Jarrod's collection and mine together to fuel the discussion and start aiding and abetting each other in what our next acquisition will be (we had a number of discussions around 2nd hand watches not qualifying as a watch purchase and hence not breaking any recent vow's not to by another watch in x months just so we could justify the next watch to the partners!).
Luckily Jarrod had his 3766 with him, a watch that I have been coveting for some time now but had never seen one in the flesh -
After trying it on a few times, we will have to see what the future brings as it has definitely re-fuelled a fire to get one of these babies into he collection, such a nice, understated watch that at the same time has so much complexity going on!
We had a number of Portuguese's at hand on the day -
As well as Jarrod's Vintage collection Portuguese but unfortunately one glaring omission was my white gold / ardoise Portuguese Perpetual Calendar - as one forum member here already knew, I had a little accident a couple of months ago with my PPC which saw my wrist meet the concrete footpath and do some damage to the case, hands, crown, crystal etc - it is currently in for a major spa treatment and hope to have it back in a few months time like new.
I told Jarrod the story of my PPC which I had not shared with the other half and later on in the evening Jarrod decided to continue on with his form for the day with foot in mouth and blurted out that the PPC was in for repair's in front of Rosie which led to some interesting discussions - all of which ended OK but I have a feeling I have not hear the last of some of the topics Jarrod kindly raised for use on the day :)
After a few beers, much talk about watches and IWC and plenty of photo taking (yes, we were those weirdoes' with all our watches out on the table taking photos in the pub) we finally called it a day.
As with every other IWC GTG I have participated in, we had a great day, enjoyed some great conversation and met some great new friends - Steff and Jarrod are off travelling / overseas for a while yet but I have a sneaky feeling that our paths will cross again sooner rather than later (we also need to indulge ourselves in the other passion we seems to share - Whisky) and that there will be some more announces here in the near future!
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