Well it's been a busy couple of weeks for the 410. Last weekend we were off to Exeter, dropping my other half off for a conference at the University (with 410 in the photo), and giving me an excuse to explore the
Exeter Festival of South West England Food and Drink - quite a mouthful to say, and more so to eat! Lots of small, local producers and a great way to pass the morning. I think it's an annual event so if you down that way next year be sure to check it out. The car was it's usual happy self, with no calamities to report, and survived the night parked outside the rather peculiar B&B we stayed at in Ottery St Mary - it turned out to be a Indian restaurant with rooms. Indian-style breakfast was promised on booking, which sounded good, but in fact individual packs of cornflakes with cartons of UHT milk were provided, with Twix bars, digestive biscuits, and a banana. I've been to India, and don't recall a breakfast like that, but I was very glad to find organic bacon sandwiches as the first stall at the food festival!
Easter weekend was another good run for the car, to Pembrokeshire in West Wales. We were in no hurry so had a very leisurely drive via
Hay-on-Wye, the Brecon Beacons and Carmarthen to get all the way there. Hay is a lovely little place, famous for its bookshops, and I found a couple of nice old road atlases of Great Britain there in the honesty bookshop - 50p for hardbacks, 30p for softbacks! However the find of the trip was a copy of LJK Setright's Anatomy of the Motorcar in a Haverfordwest charity shop. I've only flicked through it so far, but I could tell it's Setright by the opening paragraph in the chapter entitled Exhaust, which opens discussion by comparing the "deep throated 'oomp-ah'" of the euphonium with the "trumpet's clarion note", and how the shape and diameter of the instrument are tuned to provide the desired sound, as with exhausts.
On the return trip from west Wales, we were heading back more directly along the M4, but made a short detour to visit
Pendine Sands. Pendine is a small village, with lots of caravan parks and campsites, but it's attraction is the 7-mile stretch of beach which was the scene of land speed record attempts in the 1920s. The last attempt there was the most notorious, when acclaimed Welsh driver
John Thomas was killed 80 years ago last month driving his car 27-litre aero-engined car, nicknamed BABS, at around 175mph. We stopped into the small, but slightly disappointing, Museum of Speed, and although I'd read that BABS now resides there, there was no sign of her. I did see her on a lorry on the M4 (not for the first time)
a few weeks ago, so she is around still. The sands were not that busy, despite it being Easter Sunday, but it the sheer expanse of sand means they people disperse so maybe it looked emptier than it was. The sands stretch off to the east, further than the eye can see, and you have to look past the happy families playing in the sun, and imagine the noise, smell and vision of a Liberty-engined monster thundering out of the haze and through the timing traps, a burly Welshman grappling with the wheel and setting another record for the fastest man alive.
Well it's been a busy couple of weeks for the 410. Last weekend we were off to Exeter, dropping my other half off for a conference at the University (with 410 in the photo), and giving me an excuse to explore the Exeter Festival of South West England Food and Drink - quite a mouthful to say, and more so to eat! Lots of small, local producers and a great way to pass the morning. I think it's an annual event so if you down that way next year be sure to check it out. The car was it's usual happy self, with no calamities to report, and survived the night parked outside the rather peculiar B&B we stayed at in Ottery St Mary - it turned out to be a Indian restaurant with rooms. Indian-style breakfast was promised on booking, which sounded good, but in fact individual packs of cornflakes with cartons of UHT milk were provided, with Twix bars, digestive biscuits, and a banana. I've been to India, and don't recall a breakfast like that, but I was very glad to find organic bacon sandwiches as the first stall at the food festival!