A trip away - part 3.

On Saturday S & P had long-standing plans (we were only invited until the Friday orginally, but welcome to stay an extra night), so we said goodbye and finished our packing.  The reason we wanted to stay the Friday night, was because we were invited to the 40th birthday party of G, a friend of mine from school.  Since she lives in Kent, it would have been exceeding daft to come back to Nottingham from Oxford, so we stopped the extra night and went straight on from there after lunch.

Bad traffic meant that the trip took rather longer than we'd hoped, but we did enjoy looking out for red kites en route and spotted over 20.  We were staying with my lovely friend G in their gorgeous old manor house, which was all decked out for the 1974 themed party.  G had done a brilliant job with the 70's food, including a very interesting vegetable jelly - asparagas, beetroot, carrot and hard boiled egg in jelly.  Our costumes went down very well, K & M as Mildred Hubble and Tabby, A was James Herriot (not quite 1974, but they started filming in '77, so not too far out) and I borrowed M's Blue Peter badge, her cuddly toy dog, Spot, to be Shep and went as John Noakes.  It is very remiss of me, but we haven't got any photos of us in costume.  We all had a good time at the party, the girls disappeared to play with various other children and I got to catch up with some folks from school I hadn't seen for over a decade!  A & I had an interesting conversation about home ed, among other things, with a friend who now works for the Law Commission. 

The following morning, K & M played with R & L, while the grown ups did some post-party tidying, drank tea and chatted and before we headed off (fortunately realising in the nick of time that we had left Spot and an elephant behind)  M got to try out a flugelhorn.

Cheese! L & K.

A had a meeting in Brussels on Monday morning, so we dropped him off at a station to catch the Eurostar and headed north.  After stopping for a pub lunch on the way, I amazed myself by managing to drive for over 2 hours without a break.  I usually find almost any form of transport except a bicycle extremely soporific and have been known to need to stop for a nap driving home to Nottingham from my parents' near Stratford, which generally takes about 1 hour 20 minutes, so this really is a remarkable feat for me.

So that's the final installment of our trip, and a very good time was had by all, spending time with family and friends.