Fibre Workshop

Up at the crack of dawn on Wednesday to head for Dover with three alpacas on their way to Holland. We tried out the Norfolk Line to Dunkirk, marvellously quiet but truly dreadful food. We went to the cafe and I retreated instantly faced with some vegetable lasagne that looked like sick and some very tired looking lumps of meat. The restaurant wasn’t much better. The pate tasted very odd, strangely sweet, yuck.

Once on the road we spent 46 minutes stuck on the ring road around Antwerp, not very exciting really. Of course we were late getting to Leo and Marieke and several glasses of white wine had to be downed promptly to get over the traffic jam irritation. Around 24 people turned up for Chas’s Fibre Workshop which they seemed to enjoy in between eating cake. There was a lot of cake or rather gateau with acres of cream which all the blokes tucked into at ten in the morning with their coffee. Far too early for cake in my view. In fact tons of food kept arriving all day as Marieke’s helpers toiled away in the kitchen. It was hot too, 27 degrees, and we had to put a tarpaulin over the marquee so that we could see the slides, too much sunshine. Everything changed in the evening when we got back after dinner and found the marquee about to take off in a sudden squall. Everyone had to hang on to the legs while the canvas was pulled down hurridly. Amazingly the wind vanished almost immediately.

We had a tour of Leo and Marieke’s veterinary practice which has the most fantastic equipment. We wish our vet was as up to date with all the diagnostic gizmos.

We hadn’t really clocked that it was a holiday weekend what with May Day and on the Friday in Holland a holiday for the Queen.  There are lots of parades and we were given two orange stetsons and clogs. If you see two wierdos at the next show in orange, it will be us. So of course the roads were hopelessly bunged up and although we tried lots of diversions there was no escape from traffic hell particularly Antwerp. You can get to hate the Antwerp ring road. It made the M25 look like a breeze. We missed a couple of ferries and eventually managed to get on the six oclock so arrived home past midnight, certainly past our bedtime.