MERSEA   PHOTOS

Having missed the Isle of Wight as I was on holiday with the family, I decided to pop along to Mersea for the weekend.  After making a couple of calls, I arranged to continue the I-Spy and Ferdy tour of the UK, with Ferdy again riding the Orange Death Machine.  We left Leicester on Friday morning, and headed south east.  The journey was pretty boring, as anyone who has ever used the A14 will tell you, with the only stops being to fill up and grab a Mars bar. 

After leaving the M11 Ferdy decided to take off his waterproofs as he was warm and, in his best Bill Giles impersonation, Ferdy decided that “…it won’t rain now”!  Yep, you’ve guessed it, less than 10 minutes later we were in a monsoon, or as Ferdy called it ‘stupid rain’, with hail, thunder and lightning.  Needless to say, we got piss wet through, and spent an uncomfortable few minutes drying out.

At Colchester, the plan was to turn off for Mersea, but along with several others that I spoke to over the weekend, either the signpost had been hidden very well, or it wasn’t there at all as we totally missed the turn.  After reaching Clacton, and getting a stick of rock for Mrs Ferdy [not a bad exchange deal – think about it!], we turned round and this time managed to find the road to Mersea with no further mishaps.  Paid to get in and pitched my tent, near the ii internet campers.  Few beers with Brunei Dave, followed by an afternoon doze without Brunei Dave left me raring to go for the night time do.

Unfortunately, I missed one of the highlights of the weekend - the sight of D-ms and Dunney trying to put up D-ms’ big top in the dark.  Surprisingly they managed to pitch it the right way up!  After that, it was back to the do for a beer and a boogie, before crashing out.

Saturday started promisingly, with a good cup of coffee and a bacon butty.  The euphoria didn’t last too long though as Nacker and Simy arrived, the latter still smelling like a Dutch muck spreading machine.  Worse was to follow when Mad Geoff and Minxxy arrived, despite assurances the night before that they weren’t coming!  Anyway, the day was spent watching the 5-a-side [everyone was convinced that Wils had two pieces of string hanging from his shorts, until Mrs Wils kindly pointed out that they were his legs!], and the scooter games – all good fun.  The early evening was spent building up to the footie, with viewing posts being taken up ay 6-15.  Unless you’ve been in Outer Mongolia recently, I shouldn’t need to go into the events in Munich, other than to say it was excellent and 1 - 5.  Unfortunately, it got too exciting for some of us, as Mr Lightweight himself [Dunney] wandered off after the game, and wasn’t seen again until Sunday morning – though I understand that he slept like a baby!  Foe the rest us (including the 100 mph tribe) the night involved more beer and chat, and for some of us a close up of Wendy’s tongue, which I swear she could use to get insects off a log at 3 yards – Christ it even curls up at the end like a pair of Turkish slippers!

Sunday morning was a case of getting up, packing up, collecting Ferdy, and going home.  We decided to miss out most of the M11 and take the far more interesting route across country to Cambridge.  Talking of interesting, we bumped into 3 of the Second Coming in Colchester and drove with them as far as Cambridge, after which they must have found another short cut – don’t ask me how, but if I told you that it took them 8 hours to get to Mersea from Leicester, it may help to explain things!

Got home at about 1-00 pm after a journey that was even more boring than the one on the way down.  D-ms landed back some time later after being taken on the scenic route by Mrs Ferdy [the guy in the rock shop wanted a refund on the earlier exchange deal]. 

Another top rally – cheers to Colchester DVLC for staging the event and to the staff at the centre who seemed to spend the entire weekend clearing up beer bottles etc.

I-SPY, Leicester