Neil Hopcroft

The toy museum at Mountfitchet Castle is an incredible collection of toys from all eras crammed into a small building on top of the hill by the castle itself.

We went to Mountfitchet Castle – a recreation of a Norman castle. I’m not sure Nils was really old enough to appreciate it but he liked the deer and peacocks and chickens.

Right now I’m not generating enough pictures for there to be one set per day, so I’m going to look backwards through my photos as well. I’m not going to repeat any of the Stockholm, Andorra or Netherlands pictures – those are already available – but there were some holidays and other times in between […]

The picnic area at Home Farm has a number of ride-on tractors for children to play with. (I promise I’m not going to start posting pages and pages of baby pictures)

We went to the world war 2 day at Wimpole Hall, where Nils was fascinated by the military vehicles. He particularly liked the jeeps and big trucks.

I took Nils to the Gransden Airshow, he loved the planes, especially those with really bassy engines from the second world war era. He was considerably less impressed with turbine whir of the Vampire. Of the cars, I think he was most taken by the Bond Bugs, reaching over to try to climb in one.

We got some tickets for the Equestrian event at Greenwich Park. Once we had got through the queue (my instinct to allow an extra hour for travel hiccups proved itself) we got some nice seats in the stadium. It wasn’t as busy in the stands as I had expected from the queue outside. As a […]

We took a walk down to Clare Priory, which is now some ruins and an old church in the grounds of a retreat centre. There is a little gate at the bottom of a windy path with a sign that says “NO ADMITTANCE, except to ruins and church”.

Nils wanted to take a picture but couldn’t work out why the touchscreen on my camera wasn’t working (mostly because it is not a touchscreen)…so I did the actual pushing of the button, but this is how the show looked to him.

Maserati have come a long way since they couldn’t fit the whole engine under the bonnet.