Turning cinema into planes.

Well, today we failed to have a free cinema trip and instead went and spent a fair bit of money instead. Enjoyed it though in the end.

We were supposed to be going to a NSFW showing of March of the Penguins. We even left home at the time we meant to, which should have been long enough for the journey. Unfortunately all roads into town seem to be snarled up. We left the motorway, to find traffic backed up to the roundabout, so headed back onto M-way to try the next road in – I go down it pretty often at this time and is not usually very busy by then. But today it was backed up right down onto the M-way and along the hardshoulder and not moving at all really. I suspect a crash, as police car came through at one point. We made another attempt, but we were losing hope by now and this was also snarled up, we were now late and were obviously going to miss a chunk of the film, so decide to cut our loses and do something else.

We had been going to meet up with Bob and Katy and co. but at least with mobiles we were able to keep them filled in and they were able to get the tickets and see it anyway.

Seeing as we had just gone past the IWM Duxford we decided to go there. Though it’s a bit on the expensive side (though not I think bad value) so if we had realized we might not have done, esp. as we didn’t have any lunch with us so had to buy that as well. Anyway, it turned into a good day out.

Dusford was very good. There is a new Airspace exhibition focusing on the history of British aviation.  It’s not finished yet, but it is partly open. A hangar full of various British planes, including one of the prototype Concordes which was open for viewing, which was mostly full of various bits of test equipment. As  latest plane it had an escape hatch in the floor – basically, AFAICS you dropped out of the bottom of the plane –  Helen wasn’t convinced by this. There is a pretty good ‘ hands on’ bit upstairs as well, with various things to do with the construction of planes and flight which SB spent a fair while in. We looked at exhibits inside a couple of other hangars as well as some old commercial planes outside – SB was inordinately pleased to be able to go inside another one of them :-). There was much more that we could have looked at but just didn’t really have the time nor energy. They did have nice cakes in the cafe though for when you reach that point in the afternoon.

There is restoration work going on on various planes, which is being carried out in public view, so there were a number of planes is various states of dismantlement. I’m not esp. into planes, but I do like machines and things in general. Seeing complicated things like planes with all their guts exposed was interesting. It wasn’t greatly ‘ war-ry’ but there are of course lots of military planes on show. There was little bit of discussion about bombers dropping bombs. SB hoped that they were just dropping them on other soldiers, so we had to explain that no, sometimes they get dropped on ordinary people and children etc. as well.

By the time we had finished and got home we were knackered. It was time for a little relax before dinner. Though Helen read some books to SB, and a bit of SOTW.

After dinner I had to go out and pick up the latest Freecycle acquisition from someone in the village. We got one if those large (ish) freestanding pools, so pleased with that – SB has always been jealous of the Portico’s. so that should ensure lots of bad weather next summer…..

In one of those strange quirks of fate, the people listing it are the mysterious  ‘ other HE family’ that I heard about – she happened to mention it in an email. So now we know who they are, will hopefully get together at some point.