We join a coach trip for a week in Sidmouth, Devon. We are picked up from our doorstep (well... end of the drive to be more precise) and are taken to join our main coach for the week a couple of miles away on the main road. We find our driver is Andrew who drove us to Halifax last year to see the Piece Hall and he was excellent throughout.
"We have to keep to a strict schedule going down," he told us, "there's an air show in Sidmouth and they are closing the road in front of the hotel at 3:30."
Our hotel was the Royal York and Faulkner Hotel right on the seafront. I took this photo the following morning. By the time we got there they were just about to close the road and some council employee took it upon himself to walk in front of our coach all the way down to the hotel. It is a well-known fact of course that coach drivers, being professional drivers, sometimes get an irresistable urge to mow down anybody foolish enough to ignore massive vehicles approaching them at five miles per hour...
Anyway, there were quite a few people knocking about. There was also quite a bit of rain knocking about. So once we had found our room and made sure our luggage was safely inside, we went back out and sat under the hotel balcony where we had a slightly obscured view of the sea, due to parked cars and wet people, but we able to stay dry ourselves and we had a good view of the sky where we (rightly as it turned out) expected any aeroplanes to be.
It even brightened up for a bit, then thought better of it and decided to hammer it down. We were nice and dry and waved gaily as passing bedraggled souls came past giving us ferociously jealous stares...
Even the dog in front of us over the road had a rain hat on... But as luck would have it, the rain eased off a bit and it looked as though we would get an airshow after all.
A trio of 1930s Stampe biplanes gave a display, lazily swooping, rolling and flying in formation. Only one was leaving a trail of smoke behind. A foreign lass had come to join us and asked my why there was only one trailing smoke. "Either, he's the leader or the other two have had their smoke affected by the rain," I answered, "...or he's on fire..."
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