Skip to main content

Tasty Cars and Vintage Ice Cream

On the recent bank holiday Monday, a village near us had a Transport Festival.  For Graham and Toby, any display of interesting cars within 20 miles is an opportunity not to be missed, and even I can admit they're quite photogenic.  So off we went.

It reminded me of the Wood, Wind and Waves event we visited in Texas, although of course with a British slant.  Instead of longhorned Cadillacs and shiny Mustangs, there were stripy Minis, bug-eyed Rolls-Royces and sleek Jaguars.




Over here, iced drinks come a distant second to a nice cup of tea.  One car owner had carefully set up a kettle next to his antique vehicle, complete with proper china mugs.  Someone else was handing out luscious slices of Victoria sponge cake to his friends from the back of a Landrover.


And naturally, a nice bottle of beer never goes amiss!  This specimen belongs to the National Brewery Centre, just down the road in Burton-on-Trent.


At least one American car had found its way across the Atlantic - this bright blue Mercury Monterey.  The friendly British couple who owned it said they use it to raise money for cancer research.



Oh, the vintage ice cream?  I guess I should have said vintage ice cream van.  Toby selected toffee fudge from their range of unvintage and very tasty ice creams.

He also enjoyed the giant Thomas the Tank Engine railway, set up in a tent.  Not touching it all was pretty hard, though.

To top off the day, the festival organisers were running free bus rides around the village on some nice old buses.  We sat upstairs and enjoyed our elevated view, enlivened by tree branches occasionally clonking on the roof.



 Just a few more photos for you (I told you the cars were photogenic!)





And in true English fashion, we escaped just before it started pouring with rain.  I think we've had the best of the day, don't you?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ten books that shaped my life

Ten books that shaped my life in some way.  Now that wasn't a problem.  I scanned the bookshelves and picked out nine favourites without the slightest difficulty (the tenth took a little longer). The problem was that, on the Facebook challenge, I wasn't supposed to explain why .  Nope.  Having picked out my ten, I couldn't let them go without saying why they were special to me. These books are more than a collection of words by an author.  They are particular editions of those words - taped-up, egg-stained, dust-jacketless and battered - which have come into my life, been carried around to different homes, and become part of who I am. How to Be a Domestic Goddess Well, every woman needs an instruction manual, doesn't she? Nigella's recipes mean lazy Saturday mornings eating pancakes, comforting crumbles on a rainy night, Christmas cakes, savoury onion pies and mounds of bread dough.  If you avoid the occasional extravagance (20 mini Bundt tins...

Erewash Valley Trail: Ilkeston

You could spend a lot of time following old canals and railways in the Erewash Valley. This walk included parts of the Erewash Canal, the Nottingham Canal, the Nutbrook Canal, and the Stanton branch line, and I could have continued further along any one of those, if I'd had the time. I started in Kirk Hallam, which is mostly a post-war housing estate with a distinctive outline on the map: the main road to Ilkeston through the middle, and a loop road encircling the village. It looks like the London Underground logo. I parked at the lake at the top of the loop. There was a sculpture commemorating the nearby Stanton Ironworks - the ground remembers the roar of the blast  read the inscription around the base - and the remains of a lock on the Nutbrook Canal. Heading towards Ilkeston, I crossed a former golf course, now a nature reserve called Pewit Coronation Meadows, passed a large sports centre, and was soon in the town centre. There was a general impression of red-brickiness, with l...

Erewash Valley Trail: Stapleford

It had been a long wait for this walk. All through the Christmas holidays, and an inset day, and weeks and weeks of appalling weather. Now it was the end of January and there was still a dull grey layer of cloud, but at least it wasn't raining. I set out. If you like a good ex-industrial landscape, the Erewash Valley is the place to be. It is veined with old canals and railways, freckled with former factories and mills, and pitted with coal mines. The M1 and a railway run north to south through it, but parts of it still feel surprisingly rural. I had been drawn in by all that there was to discover, so I'd shelved the Portway for a little while and diverted onto the Erewash Valley Trail. I parked in Bramcote Hills Park again and had a quick look at the walled garden, overlooked by the  Hemlock Stone. Hickings Lane heads towards the centre of Stapleford. It looks like it should be a dual carriageway but it's not; there are two separate roads with a wide grass strip between th...