Goodwood Festival of Speed

I won tickets to the Goodwood Festival of Speed - the first time I think I have won anything! (Quick - buy a lottery ticket!). We travelled down to Southampton the night before as Southampton was the nearest hotel we could get to the FOS. This turned out to be a pain on two counts...it took us 1 1/2 hours to do a 45 minute journey thanks to the incredibly slow moving traffic and because we approached from that direction we ended up in a car park miles from the action. We had to walk round half the golf course to get to the show.

We had a brilliant day! We managed to spend from 9am until 6pm wandering around. My legs and feet were aching by the end of the day. And we still didn't actually get around everything! My mate Emma had tipped me the wink that our former Chairman was driving his car up the hill and it was rumoured that Sir Stirling Moss would also be driving it. It didn't happen the day we were there. Stephen was disappointed that Stirling Moss with two broken ankles was a better bet for driving it than he was!!! Sir John was driving Jim Clark's first Grand Prix car, so there were a collection of Saltires on the side: Jim Clark, Innes Ireland and Sir John. Stephen would really have liked to have been the fourth Scot in the driving seat!

The journey home was a bit of a nightmare. We crossed over the A27 on our way to the slip road and saw that it was at a complete standstill, so we turned around, found a layby and got the map out. KerryNav to the rescue again! We ended up driving cross-country on A roads from Chichester to Newbury. Then (finally) we got to Birdlip (1/2 hour from home) and found the road between there and the M5 was closed, so we had to divert through Cheltenham. It took us 4 hours to get home, sustained by the thought of opening a bottle of champers for Stephen's birthday...only to find there was none in the fridge!! Nor any food, as we'd planned to stop for dinner en-route but were so delayed that it seemed like a good idea to press on.