Saturday 29 September 2012

Stoke Bruerne "Village at War" - Day 1

(Boat Sickle - posted by Alan)

We knew we were double booked for today, and needed to share our time between this event for the start of the day, and Cath's Mum's birthday party later on.  As we would need to drive home first, and collect our two son's, and our dog Odin, we would not be able to pack in too much at Stoke Bruerne today, and ideally would need to be away by mid afternoon.

We often take the boat down a couple of locks and back at these Stoke Bruerne events - it is easy to do with our short tug, and the organisers have in the past asked that some historic boats can move around a bit to add to the interest for visitors. However we reckoned that might be a step too far today, so decided to leave "Sickle" tied up on day one, and to just spend time enjoying the sights.

We chatted a fair amount to people showing interest in the boats, but then went off to visit the traders "Black Market".  We managed not to spend lots of money as we had done last year though.  We also decided to visit the Boat pub early for lunch, reasoning we could be easily finished long before a flying display by two Spitfires was due to start at 2:00 pm.  We easily managed to finish way before then, but not until the Spitfires had unfortunately started their flying some 40 minutes early.  We did still see a fair amount of it, and were surprised both how low they flew, and how many aerobatics were done.  Anyone not arriving until 2:00 pm would have been most disappointed though - it was all over by then!

We then visited the field with a large display of old vehicles.  These ranged from motor cycles, cars and vans, through lorries and buses, as well as very large numbers of military vehicles of many types.  A very impressive display, although I plead guilty to just soaking up the atmosphere, and not studying too closely exactly what each vehicle was.  The majority "felt" right for the World War II period, but I suspect one or two may have slightly post-dated the war, I'm not sure.

As I neither had a lens suitable for photographing fast moving Spitfires in flight, nor took hardly any canal related photos, today's pictures are largely of the vehicles ad other sights in that display field, but hopefully they give some idea of the efforts put in by those who bring along their immaculately presented vehicles, and immaculately presented selves!






1 comment:

  1. Well, I'm glad I waited til Sunday! Having read this I would have missed you both and my wonderful trip down the locks on Sunday and meeting Chris.

    Odin is still on my 'to meet' list!

    Thanks for all the FUN!!

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