Greenbelt 2010

This year my wife and I went to Greenbelt for the first time. Our daughter has been going for 6 years and it seemed like fun so we thought we would give it a go. However rather than camping we were rather extravagant and hired a motor home for the long weekend.

Our plan was to drive down Thursday afternoon and 'camp' in the racecourse car park so that we would be near the front of the queue. Things didn't quite go to plan as after a (predictable) delay on the M25 we found that the M40 was shut and spent one and half hours driving along the old A40 through High Wycombe to cover what would have been 15 minutes of motorway driving! As a result we arrived at 11:30 exceedingly tired!

We did wake up in time to be near the front of the queue and so, more by luck than judgement, we found ourselves in a nice spot on the far side of the race course. The programme, all 120 pages of it, was rather overwhelming but with a little help from my daughter, who was camping elsewhere on the site, we managed to plan some things to attend.

After attending the first of his 4 talks I made an effort to hear all of Richard Rohr's talks on 'The Art of Looking Sideways at the Bible/the Church/Us and Jesus - all very interesting and challenging. I didn't get to many of the music events but Courtney Pine was brilliant. On a lighter note Tickling in Public (for children of all ages) was hilarious - the custom built electric glam rock ukulele was not to be missed!

Monday, the final festival day, was our 30th Wedding Anniversary so we met up with the children (daughter, son-in-law and son + girlfriend) in the morning. Tuesday was my wife's birthday (a significant one at that ) so they all joined us in the motor home for breakfast.

Thankfully the journey home was uneventful (even the M25) as we were both very tired.

Will we do it again? We hope to but are unlikely to afford a motor home again so are now looking at trailer tents on e-bay. Next time it shouldn't be so overwhelming so I hope we will be able to get to more talks, music and comedy.

Overall a very good way to spend a Bank Holiday weekend (with a few days either side).

P.S. I'm still puzzling over the boy who pointed at me and said 'Father Christmas' - I wasn't wearing my red suit at the time.