May bank holiday presents the usual choices of what to do. Immediately discount DIY, gardening or visiting relatives and get the bike out of the garage. You will have thought ahead and done any necessary cleaning of the bike beforehand, so you can then decide between riding to Hastings and experiencing the hold-ups, the congestion, the loonies carving you up and the resulting police interest OR... go somewhere else. The Bexhill festival of motoring was not on this year, so Gary did some looking around and came up with an alternative: the Popham Airfield open day / auto show / aero- and auto-jumble. Old planes, old cars, old bikes and stalls relating to all three. Sounded interesting!
About a dozen bikes converged at the Pied Bull on a fine Monday morning including Andy and Lee, Dave, Gary, Richard Cottrell, Chris Biggs, Clive and Helen, Colin and Mags, Robin, Graham, Tom, John and daughter Nichola, plus myself (think that's everyone, if not, sorry). A route was agreed on, Gary having done some preparatory photocopying so we had it on paper. The early stage briefly co-incided with the A21 traffic joining the M25 and we suddenly found ourselves being overtaken on all sides by some of the aforementioned loonies heading for Hastings as fast as their plastic missiles could take them. Special mention goes to the wan... er, - individual - navigating the outside lane while lying flat along the tank and seat of his bike. Now do it with a pillion on board... There was a plan to stop for a cuppa at the Hog's Back cafe but we were disappointed to find that it was closed! And we weren't the only ones judging by the steady trickle of cars, bikes and even an articulated lorry that pulled in to the car park. We scaled down our stop to just a fag-break and a chat before continuing on.
Popham was not too hard to find, at least not if like Clive you knew exactly where it was, which is just at the start of the A303. We pulled in prepared to dig out the £5 admission only to be waved straight on to the parking area. How nice of them! There were already light aircraft taking off and landing at regular intervals and a sizeable collection of single and twin-seaters parked up along the edge of the (grass) runway. First stop however was the refreshment van, where there was a substantial queue. Hoping that it would move fairly quickly most of us joined on the end and were relieved to be nearing the front after only a few minutes. Burger or hot dog, plus chips, were popular choices, most having a cup of tea on the side.
Bearings were then taken on the bar before actually starting to have a look round at what there was to see. Although there were some Owners' Club stands around and about there didn't seem to be much method to the general distribution of the cars, bikes, and even planes on show. Still there was a fair diversity of each if you winkled out the interesting ones.
The public was allowed a surprising amount of access to the parked-up 'planes, even being able to cross the runway at a couple of points where stewards were posted. Hence we walked over to the other side and strolled around admiring the different designs of aircraft which to me seemed to vary between "rather flimsy" and "extremely flimsy" but I'm nervous of anything not large enough to show an in-flight movie. Still I believe there is such a thing as a certifcate of airworthiness and I can only hope that extends down to the most rudimentary of them. It was a bit disconcerting to realise that a plane in the next row behind you had started up and was taxiing along with its wingtips just a few feet behind you. Rumours of a Spitfire appearance were unfounded, unless it was earlier in the day and we missed it. There were a couple of old biplanes taking off just as we started walking around but they may already have been heading back to their home base because we didn't see them land again. Unfortunately there was neither a program of events in evidence nor a tannoy commentary so it was not clear what had happened or was going to happen.
However the sun was out, the stalls were busy and so was the ice cream van. The time went quite quickly and by half past three we were gravitating back to the bikes. Chris Biggs and Tom Friar were off first as they intended to visit Bob in hospital on the way home. The majority of the rest left at about 4 p.m. and followed Gary on a pleasant "scenic" route, by the end of which we had put in just over 200 miles with no major hold-ups.