Stoke Bruerne Village At War Weekend - 15th & 16th September

(Boat Sickle - posted by Alan)

(Yet another very retrospective blog post.)

We had fought like mad to actually be at "Village at War", one of our favourite events of the boating calendar, but as the weekend approached it looked increasingly from the forecasts like it could be a washout.  We had done a "Village at War" two years previously where the Sunday had largely got rained off, so we relaise how important it is to the organisers that bad weather doesn't restrict visitor numbers to the point that no funds are raised by the event.

However as we moved into the weekend the forecasts got a bit more optimistic - Saturday it seemed might not be too bad, although Sunday still looked fairly hopeless.

The reality was nothing like as bad as even the revised predictions.  Saturday was actually a pretty good day.  Even Sunday held fairly good until about lunch time, after which the bad weather did start to appear.  However by then most exhibitors and traders seemed fairly satisfied - a good measure of success seems to be when the burger stall runs out of burgers, and Peter Oates assured us that this had happened reassuringly quickly!

It does seem though that although we carry cameras around a lot, we are getting progressively less good at taking photographs of these events.  I have to admit a lot of time was spent eating or drinking at The Boat, and this may have contributed to a lack of pictures.  However, as is customary at Stoke Bruerne events, "Sickle" did a bit of parading, and there are at least some photos of that!

Stoke Bruerne Village at War
Miles: 2.0, Locks: 4

Total Miles: 539.0, Locks: 272