I was sat on the bed, with my back to the window, reading the Saturday papers on my laptop. It didn't seem likely to me that the pub would be on fire. Why would the pub be on fire? And even if there was a fire in the kitchen, you wouldn't be able to see it from where we were. The kitchen is out the back. I looked round. There was indisputably smoke going up past our window.
"It's OK," said he. "It's not smoke. It's a traction engine turning into the car park."
This also seemed unusual, so I got up to look. And there was indeed a traction engine turning into the car park, followed almost immediately by another one. And over the course of the next hour more steam engines turned up until there were, all told, six or seven of them, with their little caravans and their trailers and other paraphernalia cluttering up the car park of the Swan@Stoford. It was all very exciting.
We ran across a rather quizzical looking Carl when we were heading out a bit later. Had he been expecting a load of steam engines to rock up into his car park? Seems they come every year, on their way to the Great Dorset Steam Fair in Tarrant Hinton, near Blandford Forum, which is held in the week after the bank holiday weekend. But there are usually only two or three of them! Still, all of the traction engine attendants were ambling around in the car park armed with pints of beer, so I guess he does all right out of them for food and drink. And they hadn't taken up absolutely *every* space in the car park. There was still room for us to park when we got back later. Although we noted that Carl had taken the precaution of moving all his notice boards off the lawn so there was extra parking if need be.
Being owned by a traction engine requires early starts. We were awake by six - but we are accounted weirdly early risers by our friends and acquaintances. By half six there were one or two hardy steam souls out polishing their engines. By seven all of them were out and about, stoking their fires, polishing their machinery, running a little sausage sizzle barbie, getting ready for the day. By the time we were ready to head off, they had started making their stately way out of the car park and were heading slowly and steadily off towards Dorset. They spaced their departures out so as not to cause too much disruption. But we headed off by a back way anyway, expecting there to be no steam engines left when we got back later that afternoon.
But there were. There were two more. New ones, whose people were sat in the same alcove of the pub as we were when we went down for supper. Nice people. 8 men, one woman and a lad, changed out of their Fred Dibnah gear, cleaned up and looking as though they had never been anywhere near a traction engine that day!
So it was something of a worry when we came down for breakfast this morning to hear one of the blokes cheerily informing whoever it was he was talking to on the phone that there had been a bit of a drama overnight. A bit? It surely counts as more than a bit of a drama when one of your party gets carted off to hospital in an ambulance at 5 in the morning after suffering carbon monoxide poisoning when his caravan fridge malfunctioned? I would call that quite a lot of a drama, especially since he had to be kept in hospital for a further 24 hours and therefore was out of action for the day's events!!! Carbon monoxide monitors are the way to go!
We left before they got underway so I don't know if the bloke was OK. But none of the rest of them seemed unduly worried so I suppose he was.
But we don't need to buy a ticket for the Dorset Steam Fair this year. Enough of the engines came to us to make us perfectly happy :-)
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| Steamy excitement in The Swan's car park. Click on the photo for the weekend's photo album |
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