'Airbourne'

This weekend we went down to Eastbourne to visit my family and had a lovely couple of days ambling about on the sea front.  Every year Eastbourne holds a fantastic 4 day air show featuring a huge range of aircraft from military jets to Victorian style bi-planes and Spitfires to Chinooks and this seemed like too good an opportunity to miss for a picnic and a jolly.

As the show didn't start until lunchtime on Sunday, we spent the morning wandering round The Redoubt, a Napoleonic fortress on the sea front which has been turned into a fab museum stuffed with military history.

There are just enough things to keep you fascinated but not so many that you feel completely overwhelmed.

There is also a rather nice little cafe...

We did get rather sucked in and suddenly realising the time, had to rush off to try and find a good spot on the packed beach.

Just in time, we found a perfect place opposite centre stage and got stuck into ice cold Lambrusco and a teetering pile of sandwiches just as the first planes arrived.

We then spent the afternoon watching the spectacle bathed in sunshine, munching on cake (as it is very almost Edward's birthday and we were sort of early-celebrating) and taking lots of bad photographs of aeroplanes.

(flourless almond and chocolate cake...yum)

It's amazing how riveting the aircraft are, a bit like watching fireworks - even after a whole afternoon of them we could hardly tear our eyes away to cut another piece of cake.

There was a lot of stomach turning loop-the-looping, a couple of wartime relics, even ladies on top of bi-planes and of course the Red Arrows made their usual spectacular appearance.

We went home slightly sunburnt and full of delicious picnic, to dreams of airborne daredevil stunts and the thrills of flight.