What A Humbling Day

Well, we've had such a lovely day today. We went over to Lincolnshire to meet up with Rob's Grandad, Mum, cousin Kim and her partner Richard. They're all up here for Grandad's RAF meetup and today was a memorial to all the squadron members. We've been down there before and it never fails to blow me away. They hold it at the old airfield that was used in the war. Grandad flew Lancaster bombers and was based with the Dam busters, so there is a huge museum there now, including an original Lancaster plane.

They had a fly past by a spitfire which was brilliant and there was supposed to be a Lancaster flypast but the weather was too bad for it to takeoff. However, they got the Lancaster there out of the hanger and started the engines so they could taxi it up the runway a little bit and it was so amazing to see. It was actually a little emotional too.

Afterwards we went into the hanger where they have thousands of artefacts, from bits of engine parts to flight records, life jackets and an actual cockpit that you could sit in. I was in there about 2 minutes then had to come out, it was so tiny, I've no idea how they spent hours in there on bombing raids. I also always go and look at the diaries of that some of the men wrote, it's just so humbling to read what they went through, you just can't even imagine.

The kids loved it! Xander was fascinated with the planes and Emily seemed to really take on board what war was and what everyone had to do.

Here's a couple of pics. the first is Xander and I infront of the Lancaster. The second is Grandad infront of the plane he used to pilot. We were just so proud of him and everything he did. Here's some links to video of the spitfire flyby and the Lancaster!

http://s132.photobucket.com/albums/q13/lougillard/?action=view&current=video-0014.flv
http://s132.photobucket.com/albums/q13/lougillard/?action=view&current=video-0012.flv