This week was almost as ridiculously busy as last week. On Wednesday Stephen and I drove down to one of our sister sites near Salisbury. He had a 1 1/2 day meeting and due to the complicated travel/social arrangements, I had to go with him and hot desk. We stayed in Salisbury which is another place that is gorgeous and on the "we must come back here for a weekend" list.
When the meeting was over on Thursday we whizzed along the A303/M3 to Fleet to check into our next hotel and meet with former-POQI and his family for a BBQ. We had a thoroughly good time! The kids were on fine form - the ice was down Stephen's back in a very short time! Beth dragged out the swingball from the shed and I immediately barred Stephen from playing given his recent track record. (Louise was fine, but I wasn't risking any more of our friends children getting black eyes!). After a very nice evening and a few buckets of wine and beer we walked back to Fawlty Towers for a quick OJ and lemonade (I'm not kidding!) at the bar. Then it was upstairs to the stiflingly hot bedroom with the saggy bed. I don't think either of us slept much as we were boiling and clinging onto the edge of the bed so we didn't roll together into the dip as it was much too hot for flesh to touch flesh.
I wearily pulled myself from bed at 7am as we didn't want to be too late getting away as it was a 90 minute drive to Goodwood according to googlemaps. Which is why it was surprising that we struggled to get ready, breakfasted, checked out and into the car much before 8:45. The journey was pretty hellish in places. We seemed to hit every bit of traffic between Fleet and Chichester and about 15 miles from Goodwood we ground to a complete crawl. We were pretty sure that we'd just hit the queue to get in, but after about 5 miles of crawling we hit a town and the traffic just disappeared like magic. Now we were worried that we'd taken the wrong turning!
We made good time to Goodwood after that, and got parked up under direction from the 16 year old stewards. We got out the car and had a "oh god, we're not going to get out" conversation with the lady next to us as the 16 year olds had parked us 3 cars deep!! Thankfully we were at the back and they were leaving room behind us, but I don't know how the folks in the middle were going to get anywhere!
The whole day was a kid in a candy store event for Stephen. He is a huge Formula 1 fan and there were cars everywhere. Everything from the recent crop of Brawn's and McLarens to the F1 cars of yesteryear including Ayrton Senna's Lotus and Nigel Mansell's Williams. We wandered around for hours in the paddock, watched the cars take the run up the hill course, heard them start up from a distance of about a foot (deafening!), and saw the occasional driver (Alan McNish). There was also a display from the Red Arrows and Peter Fonda was there driving a replica of his Easy Rider bike. We were pretty tired and sunburned by the time we headed off around 5:30.
My most excellent map reading skills were called into play on the way back when the overhead signs on the motorway were telling us that there was a tailback to Winchester. We did NOT want to sit in that and amazingly the junction which offered us the only alternative route was just ahead of us...as opposed to just behind us which is our usual luck! We got home tired, sunburned and happy at about 9:30. Just time for a sandwich and a drink before falling into bed.
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