Vroooommm…..

I try not to write too much about Plus events on this blog as, although Plus makes up quite a large part of my life at times, there are other places to blog about it. This event in particular was rather special though, as it has been an idea in my head for over a year now, before I actually got around to doing something about it to make it a reality.

Near where I live, there is Scalextric centre and I have wanted to visit for some time. I haven’t played with the little cars since I was a kid and it sounded like a good laugh, but racing against regular attendees didn’t seem like such a great idea to me. I found out that the centre only needed a guarantee of 10 people to get exclusive use, and so started the idea of a Kings Lynn Plus group visit.

There is an excellent pub in a small village called Whaplode St Catherine which brews its own beer (Old Honesty being my favourite!) and does excellent food. John, the landlord, is a very accommodating bloke and has previously offered use of the overflow car park for camping. The idea very quickly came together, to hold a weekend of camping, with food and drink at the pub, and an evening at Electric Tracks which is only about 10mins down the road. I invited some of my Plus friends, and thus we ended up with a small, but quality, event which was thoroughly enjoyable.

The action of the racing itself is already covered in my blog on the Kings Lynn Plus website, but basically involved controlling the little cars to cover the most laps in a set time on a series of 8 different tracks which are laid up to be replicas of actual UK and European racetracks such as Donnington Park, Hockenheim, etc.. The times that we were not so good at controlling the cars were spent chasing around to put them back on the track before continuing the race! All of this was the cause of much hilarity and unintended exercise, particularly on the Donnington Park track which was around 15 feet in length. I didn’t totally disgrace myself, coming joint third overall.

Aside of the Scalextric, the rest of the weekend was also very enjoyable - Friday night was spent in the pub eating, drinking, playing cards and darts (although not at the same time!). Despite being terrible at darts, I managed to beat Chris, Matt, Rob and Biggles (although to be fair Biggles was suffering from a distinct lack of sleep having just finished a night shift before spending the rest of the day travelling up to the event, so probably wasn’t as much competition as he might have been when awake!).

A very foggy start on the Saturday saw us heading into town, visiting the charity shops, the market, and the Wetherspoons until the sun came out and we went to look at Ascoughfee Hall, a historical house and gardens with a cafe. Somewhere that is so close to home that I would never have visited otherwise proved to be extremely interesting and an afternoon well spent. Killing time before the non-campers arrived with a few games of boules in the pub car park rounded up Saturdays pre-racing activities.

Breakfast on Sunday before people headed home was at the local truck stop, sampling the delights of the full English breakfast, and then, for me, straight off to a meeting of the Kite club where I flew my newly repaired star kite (it was actually repaired on the campsite on Friday night!). What a hectic weekend!!! Already looking forward to doing it all again another time.