Highs and Lows ?
Highs would be the day out to The Thursford Experience which was absolutely superb, especially watching Mr Robert Wolfe playing his huge organ (Wurlitzer....oh do behave! anyway, here is Roberts website ) on the stage followed by a ride on the two awesome vintage Carousels that they have at the museum, superb.
The boat trip on the Norfolk broads was also a terrific day out for the whole family as was the drive across to Walsingham and the return trip to Hemsby via the coastal road route. If you have never come "Off Piste" when touring the Norfolk area then i recommend that you give it a whirl as the amount of fantastic, empty beaches that you will find beggars belief and it is such a refreshing change to not have to fight for a square meter of sand :-).
There was only one real "Low" during the week, and this sadly turned out to be the one event that I was really looking forward too......the Lowestoft Air Festival.
Things started off well, we managed to get the clan up, washed and fed on time.We left the chalet at about 11am, then made our way towards Lowestoft via the Great Yarmouth route.Within a few miles we had hit awful traffic, but hey, this was going to be soooo worth it...i thought!.
We arrived at the Dip Farm Park and ride at about 12:05PM, and after paying £10 for the Park and Ride fare, we left the family bus and headed towards the rather worryingly long queue for the bus service.It took us about 25-30 mins to eventually get on board on of the vehicles, and so we then set off for the short ride down to the Lowestoft seafront.
I was aware of the fact that this was a VERY busy event, but nothing prepared me for the awful experience that lay ahead for us.
After leaving the bus, paying our donation of £10 for entry into the viewing area (seafront!), we joined the fray,only to find ourselves being swept along by a huge crowd, all looking for somewhere to pitch up a deckchair !.
The main problem was that someone in their wisdom had decided to site a large funfair, complete with the obligatory "Bloody noisy" touts trying to get you to have a gamble and win a giant cuddly toy (Why?).This added to the fun in so much as that now not only could you see the aeroplanes that were (apparently) doing displays along the seafront,but,due to the 2 gobby gits with the microphones who were annoying the crap out of me with their persistent use of canned laughter and pre recorded adverts telling us to try and win a 6ft tigga tiger and some other Dell Boy character selling "Hooky" perfume,we could not even hear the commentary over the system......Great !.
We eventually found refuge in some sort of life buoy stowage building along the front, set up our folding chairs and tried to look on the bright side.Sadly we found this impossible to do after several rather selfish gits (who by the way made terrible windows) decided to sit on the wall directly in front of us blocking the little view that we had of the beach/seafront which was completely covered in folk trying to find a square centimeter of open ground.
I took mini me off to the Airfix demo tent to try and keep his mind away from wandering off, and it was after we had been there for about 10 mins that I received a call from Teresa saying that this was just mad and that we should get out now!.......sadly, i had to agree, so after joining the rest of the group we headed back to the park and ride bus and set off dejectedly for the car park.
The conductor asked why we had decided to come back so early...my response was unprintable !.
Anyway, at least we got to see the Lancaster and Spitfire (from the car park!), and later the Vulcan (from a caravan park further down the coast, so all was not entirely lost, and at least I now know why it is called "The Lowestoft Air Festival"...because as you will find out if you ever decide to attend.....you will find that "Air" is hard to come by when you are crammed into such a ridiculously small area of land with 210,000 others. Shame :-(
Erm.................................................Excuse me!, but has Anyone seen any aeroplanes around here ?
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