Everyone’s flying this weekend

It was another quiet weekend for us. No great adventures, just a host of little adventurelets. Friday night we wandered around the footpaths near the house collecting blackberries, ending up in a very short time with 2.5kg of them. Saturday morning we turned them into seven jars of bramble jelly. Yum! It was lovely on our toast this morning.

After a bit of work in the garden picking aubergines and beans, and pulling up some of the squash plants, we then headed off to meet Bill and Artemis at Midlands Sky, the Midlands rocket festival. We arrived just in time for a host of small and large rockets to be launched. Richard found out that getting good pictures of rockets is surprisingly difficult. The pillar of smoke on the right is the red and black rocket on the left, a second or so after liftoff. That particular one seemed to get from the ground to 3400 feet (the bottom of the clouds) in no time at all. He had an easier time with the rocket-powered glider, which launched as a rocket, then had a little charge to flip the nose horizontal and then glided off into the distance. I would guess it landed about a mile away – very impresive!

Sunday was the West Midlands Orienteering Relay Championships at Hartlebury Common near Stourport on Severn, and both Richard and I were running for our club and trying out our fancy new club tops for the first time! Richard was on first leg for his “Senior Men” team (yes, he’s a senior citizen already) and came back well in the lead. I was last leg for our “Open Women” team, and since there were no other teams in that category I also got to go out in first place! Happily, I didn’t make any catastrophic mistakes, and Richard even managed to capture some “action shots”. In the end both teams finished first (of course, mine finished last too) and our club, Harlequins, managed to win six of the trophies on offer; a particularly good result, no doubt helped by it being home territory for us.

So a rather adventure-free weekend for us. We promise something a bit more epic next weekend!