8th May 2016. Start of the Farewell Tour – Shuttleworth Airshow, Bedfordshire, England.
We started our tour on Sunday 8th May. Gethan drove ahead of us in my car, which he was borrowing for the year that we’d be away.
We drove to a Diner on the way to Old Warden where we were all heading to see the Shuttleworth airshow. There the three of us we met up with our other two sons Morgan and Austyn.
We had a great day watching the old planes and trying desperately to hide from the scorching sun, we were pleased to find a hedge to shade us.
Our sons used our picnic rug as a sunshade.
It was really lovely spending the day with our children but we felt very sad having to say goodbye to them knowing that we wouldn’t see them again for ages. Austyn was also going away but he was leaving the UK for about two and a half years because he was off travelling to Australia and then South America, in a couple of weeks time. We wouldn’t see Morgan again until Christmas when he and Gethan were going to come out to visit us in Spain. It was good to know that at least we would be seeing Gethan in Derby tomorrow, so we still had a bit of time with him.
Morgan and Austyn drove back to Reading and our youngest son Gethan drove back up to Derby where we were going to join him the following day with our huge TV that we were transporting for him.
As we watched all the cars leaving the airshow at the end of the day we suddenly realised for the first time that we were in our home and we didn’t need to join the queue instead we could wait where we were, make a meal and sit and eat it while the traffic died down, which is what we did.
It was the perfect place to have dinner sitting and looking out over the pretty grounds at Shuttleworth.
Before we left we phoned a pub in the Brit Stops book called St John’s Arms in Melchbourne, Bedfordshire and checked that we could stop overnight in their car park.
We were pleased when we arrived at the pub, it was situated in the countryside and our only ‘neighbours’ (excuse the pun) were horses in a field. The landlord and landlady were extremely helpful, which we greatly appreciated considering they were just closing the pub for the night when we arrived, they even found a couple of plastic bottles for us so they could pour us a couple of pints of real ale to take out to the van.