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Happy birthday Grumps!

The end of yet another whirlwind weekend - I'm really not sure where they go to but one moment it's Friday afternoon and then the next it's Sunday evening.

We had planned this weekend (unknown to Mum & Dad) to hot foot it down to Somerset on Friday evening in order to join the birthday boy for a 70th birthday dinner at a pub in Langport. Amanda had booked a room for us all with the expectation of us being there between 6 and 6:30... quite how I thought that was doable on a sunny Friday afternoon in September I don't know. Even the girls commented as I picked them up at gone 4pm from school that we didn't have a hope of making it. The pick up would have gone smoother had the kids appreciated the sense of urgency I was feeling. Abi managed to appear relatively quickly, even finding the time to get a drink from Gabbies on the way, but Izzy took ages. Having rung her 5 times I finally discovered she was waiting in the normal pick up spot rather than in the car park as requested - arghhhh! By then the queue to get out of school was enormous and so it took us another 5 mins to get out. This all meant that my mental calculation of getting away at 4pm had to be adjusted to a 4:36pm departure time - not ideal! We then had to battle the A303 which is never great at the best of times. In the end we switched the Waze App on and it took us down some interesting (very narrow) diversions to miss the worst of the traffic, along with the other 30 cars all following the same App no doubt! By some miracle we arrived only a few minutes past the allotted 6:30 window feeling a bit flustered by in one piece.
Why this surprises me I don't know, it's always a bit of a rush to get to Somerset and I never feel completely relaxed - a weekend never feels long enough given all of the other things I want to squeeze in before it's time to go back to work / school. Anyway, Dad was chuffed we were there and we had a lovely meal before heading back to Amanda's for the night. Before bed we decided to have a 'quick' game of Scattagories which turned into about 6 games. At 11pm I had to give up and we left Abi and Laurie playing - gone are says when we used to get them into bed so we could have some time alone!

Saturday dawned clear and sunny and after walking the dogs and breakfast we settled in to shout at Laurie and Abi to get dressed and eat something so we could head over to Mum and Dad's. Blimey they are alike - they'd got stuck playing some game and didn't want to move! Hearing Amanda shout at Laurie is just like hearing me shout at Abi - pretty much word for word!  We finally got them motivated and went over to Stocklinch for coffee and birthday cake before leaving to go to Langport to put their canoe in the water and spend a few hours messing about in a boat. We really couldn't have asked for better weather, in fact it was baking hot and I caught the sun. The standard of canoeing did differ slightly (an understatement if ever there was one) but everyone got a go (apart from Mum who I think is still waiting for her turn) and all the kids loved it. We managed to get a decent sandwich in Langport before turning the boat round and heading back, with Amanda braving the boat with both Abi and Izzy in it. Clearly there was no way was I going to do that - i'd have been shouted at within the first 30 seconds regardless! 

Conscious I wanted to get back we finally got the boat out where we had parked the cars (we had to wait for a couple having wedding photos on the slightly muddy bank of the river - random), said our goodbyes and let the Sat Nav take us what seemed to be a long way round until I realised it was heading for the M5 rather than an apparently very congested A303. Turned out this was probably no bad thing as just before Junction 16 the car started making a very ominous grinding noise from the front driver's side, so much so that I decided we would have to pull over. We rang Glenn who got us to ring the AA, only to hear it would be 2 hours before they expected to be with us. Fortuitously (according to the kids) we had stopped right next to a Costa so they were happy for the first 10 minutes before realising it was going to be a long wait. Luckily Glenn came to our rescue and turned up first, had a quick look and declared it driveable so he took it with Izzy while Abi and I jumped in the Mini to come home - hopefully the Landrover isn't too broken. My professional opinion (Google) is the wheel bearings but who knows what that actually means!

Today was a case of getting through the washing, my normal 10 mile run, the Bike Show for Glenn and Segway races for the kids (we finally have 2 of them!)... oh and also trying to remember it is Glenn's birthday as well today. Let's face it, he doesn't want us to make a fuss so we haven't. In fact, we didn't even bother with cards as he would have only put them straight into the recycling. We just aren't very good at birthdays!



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