14/10/2006 No music. A busy weekend. Part One - heading off oop North...

Subject	A busy weekend.... Part One
PostedDate	10/15/2006
	Had a pretty busy weekend: It started off with me playing a gig with my band on Friday night - which went much better than expected after a rather shaky rehearsal the previous night.  After getting home about two in the morning from the gig, I had to get up early (by my standards) to drop the hire van off and then get a lift up to York from my mate John and his girlfriend Gill. The main reason for the trip to York was to support our old mate Biggles who was playing a gig in his home town with his new band - he's come to see my band a couple of times in the last year so... Anyway, we arrive in Yorkshire's county town in the afternoon and help out with some furniture moving and destruction at Biggles place. In the evening we reward ourselves with a visit to the Blue Bell - probably my favourite pub in the world and no visit to the beautiful city of York is complete without a visit to sample their fine ales.  Gill wanted a bottle of some lager or other, but was informed that the Blue Bell doesn't serve bottled beer - I found this most amusing.  Then we went to Biggles local as it was sort of on the way home, but left after one drink as the disco made conversation too difficult. I wasn't sad to leave as I thought it was a typical 'council estate pub' - ie; not a very good one with poor beer. We ended up in The Fox, which I found much more agreeable.  We got up mid-morning on Sunday and enviously inspected Biggles ever changing motorcycle collection.  Then we had to drop him off at his gig around lunchtime for soundcheck etc. This left us with a few hours to kill. We filled this time very well with a visit to the nearby Yorkshire Air Museum based on the old world war two bomber airfield at Elvington. Incidentally, this is where Top Gear's Richard Hammond had his recent mishap. We found the museum very interesting and I can certainly recomend a visit if you like that sort of thing - if you don't then don't bother looking below or reading the rest of this post... The museum contains a wide range of aircraft and other related items from pre-war up to aircraft types which are still in current use by the R.A.F. Some of these are maintained in 'live' condition and sometimes perform 'fast' (as in nearly fast enough to take off) taxi runs on the runway on open days. Many of the airfield buildings have been restored to their WW2 condition - including the control tower which you can inspect from inside. I found this a little spooky, but maybe that's just me. The place manages to retain some of it's wartime atmosphere and there are many interesting indoor and outdoor exhibits to give some insight into what life was like in the dark days of 1939-1945.