If there's one thing this trip has taught me is that it's difficult to keep up with a lot of content updates while on the road and following a busy schedule. It certainly doesn't help that I've had a cold for the better part of the last three days. Oh don't worry... It's not a very bad one and I'm not letting it slow me down too much.
So I woke up in Nottingham, yes, 'that, Nottingham. This city is very interesting, a different kind of beast, but I'll get to that later because today... Today, I didn't spend much time here at all.
Where do you store all your tanks?
No, our first day in Nottingham wasn't spent there until the evening. Instead, twelve of us travelled to the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. This museum tour, roughly an hour and a half away from Nottingham, was actually put together specifically for my father and brother who preferred going there than an extra day at Warhammer World. The other ten of us just happened to jump on the opportunity.
Just planes... Everywhere.
Duxford is actually a difficult experience to describe chronologically. There are no events that divide the experience in easy to sequence order. Instead, let me describe to you, what Duxford is and I'll try to include as many photos as I can.
Duxford is essentially an airport where the hangers and surrounding buildings are exhibits. Some repurposed, some purpose built. Some are straightforward but impressive, like the ground warfare exhibit, boasting a disturbing amount of cannons, mortars, batteries, tanks and other land-based vehicles, others are simply insane, like the American and British aeronautical history hangars.
These last two exhibits are each housed in enormous hangars, planes of various shapes and sizes can be found, tightly packed almost on to of one an other. Most impressively, several planes are simply hung from the ceiling like models in a child's bedroom. It's worth noting that these are not tiny personal aircrafts and WW II fighters (though the later do pepper the space) but rather a B-52, B-17 and B-29 sharing the floor with an SR-71, and that's just in the American hangar. The British hangar has a Concord lying around.
While these are the two most batshit-crazy exhibits to behold, it's the smaller ones that put the insanity into perspective. Duxford has smaller hangers that are just infested by aircrafts that can best be described as artifacts and they're polled away with care but also a level of laissez-faire that can only come from being surrounded by such multitude of historical planes and other important items.
Needless to say, Duxford is immense. We walked all day, pretty much to exhaustion before we got back to the bus, ready to go back to Nottingham just in time to join backnupmwith the rest of the group to head out to diner and allegedly a pub crawl.
Again we went as a group to a pub. This time however it was themed. You'd think it Would have something tondo with Robin Hood, what with the whole Nottingham thing, but no! It's actually themed on Edgar Allan Poe and is called the Pit & Pendulum. The closest thing to a goth Irish pub I've ever seen and it really kind of works. Had great food and drink but then the crawl began.
The pub crawl was a well intentioned event that I simply did not have the energy for. We had this awesome in-character story teller that gave us a bit of history of each pub we visited. This meant more standing around which was slowly murdering my back, so I bailed early. Apparently I missed out, but I don't regret my decision. The back needs what the back needs to survive.
JF