Hi all...
Hope everyone that visited the show had a good time...
Good to see Rob (Pulham) Phil (Dyson) and Ross (Peacock)... I appologise massively if I've got anyone's names wrong... I have a terrible memory for names sometimes..
Well it was an okay show, though I think a lot of the traders were complaining about the turnout... wasn't so good!
Colin and I managed to get the car loaded up by around 6:15 and so headed on our way back to Southend where Colin lives and where my car was too... Got down the M62 and across to the A1, and heading towards Newark (still a long way from home) when a tyre blew on the trailer.. Unfortunately we hadn't remembered to bring the spare wheel
So a call was made to the very nice man at the AA, at least we tried to call the AA... My phone didn't have any signal, and Colins was rapidly running out of battery
We were hoping for a quick turnaround as we had planned to pop into a supposedly very good fish and chip shop near Ollerton on the way home for the mid-term snack.. There was still time if we were quick..
Colin was giving my phone and it's lack of reception one last try and he asked me to find out exactly where we were so that he could tell the man on the other end of the phone. I checked my TomTom at which point the Boss called us from Sudbury to see how we had fared during the day. I put the satnav down......
Colin jumped in the car and headed down the road after another failed attempt to hail the knights of the road... After a couple of minutes I started to think to myself... "Where did I put my TomTom ?!.... OH NO !!!"
Colin returned from his voyage for the quest of mobile phone signal, and said he'd managed to get through to the recovery people, at which point I checked the car to see if my TomTom was on the passenger seat of in the footwell.... No.. I then realised what I'd done... I'd put the ruddy thing on the roof when I answered the phone to Pete Hunt !
So I idly walked down the road that Colin had just driven to see if I could find my satnav... Walked... walked a little further.. and then a little further...
HALF A MILE LATER...! There it was lying in the verge on the side of the road looking a little sorry for itself.. a few bumps and grazes, but would it work...? Press the button on the top? You bet it works !! :laugh:
Walked back, and saw that there was a strange person hanging around where the car and trailer were... I was pretty sure that we hadn't brought him with us... Turns out someone else had broken down too... An oil rig structural engineer from Ely who had blown both the head gaskets on his newly built, heavily modified and tuned Harley Davidson on the same piece of road as us.. Clearly the A1 at Newark wasn't a fan of southerners !
I should think the time now was around 8:30pm and Colin said that the AA would be sending out a tyre replacement man with a new tyre for our trailer. An hour later we get a call on my phone... Using the steel body of the car as an extra antenna for extra reception on my phone the tyre man said he can't find the size of tyre that we need, so we would need to be recovered..
9:30pm we get another call from AAHQ saying that we would definitely be recovered.
10pm The AA turns up.... not for us, but for our new friend with the Harley... only to find that he'd brought the wrong type of recovery truck with him.. we both needed flatbeds..
10:30pm Thunder and Lightning.
10:45pm A lorry drove past.
11pm Nothing.
11:30pm Nothing - No chance of making the Fish and Chip shop now..!
11:45 I prodded my foot against the blown tyre on the trailer... surely that would help
12am We get a call from the girl that is driving our flatbed truck to say she is on her way from Nottingham... A girl ? Now, I'm not sexist, but I never thought I would see a girl driving an AA truck...
12:15am I saw a girl driving an AA truck...
So by 12:30am we were finally on our way.. trailer being chauffeured home on the big yellow truck and us in the car... We said our goodbyes to the friendly oil rig engineer and his bike... He was still waiting, and apparently had another hour wait too... In the heaviest rain I have seen for a long time. Poor lad..
Well, we eventually get to Stansted (where I live) on the M11 by 3am, but of course my car is in Southend at Colins house... Straight past my house...
4am We get to Colins house..
5am I fall into bed !
Shattered...!
JB.
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