National Transport Festival of Wales 2007

National Transport Festival of Wales
Sunday 17th June 2007

This year "the car show", as I call it, was brilliant, for some reason it seemed better than last year, in fact it was better than ever. The Liberty Stadium was the place to be on Sunday, I may have gone down on the Saturday if I'd known it was a two day thing. I found out about it from a banner on the footbridge by Tesco in town, the left hand side of it was covered by a tree so when coming up to it in a car all I saw was 'Truck Show', I was pretty excited cause I thought the missing word was MONSTER. It turns out the word was WELSH which, very obviously, isn't as exciting as monster. After that blow I must have only seen 17th and not noticed 16th.

There was a bit of a military operation to get there, I suppose getting to the stadium from Clase isn't that much harder than getting to Singleton Park from here but it felt a bit more exciting, I got all our bus options from firstgroup.com (which turned out to be a bit wrong) and set off. It was all going smoothly until we got to Somerfield in Morriston, they only had jumbo packs of bourbon creams when I wanted a normal sized pack and when I went to get a bottle of pop they didn't have any Diet Coke. Some woman had a basket full of goodies at the only open till so I left the biscuits and went to Woolworth for the good old "2 for £1.40" on pop and some crisps. We missed a bus and had to endure a mildly bonkers guy talking him to himself for 10 minutes until the next bus came.

There were a load of cool cars at the festival as well as trucks, vans, buses and coaches, we didn't bother going over to the bike bit cause it was a bit boring last year, the best part of that was seeing a stuffed golden eagle in the museum stores. As I was saying, there were loads of cool vehicles but I don't have much of an interest in that kind of stuff, I was there for the old men and their dogs (the four legged kind), also the poster on the bus said there would be 'autojumble' which sounded pretty special (unfortunately it was just a load of old greasy engine parts). Within 5 minutes of arriving there was a great dog fight by what appeared to be a quiet little collie type of thing and one of those brownie/reddish curly-eared ones. The collie type went for its jugular and curly-ears whimpered like a baby. After his scare he was free to enjoy the rest of the day, he seemed to be following us to make sure he didn't miss out on any cool stuff.

There was also a chihuahua there that was proper 'ard, it was barking at everyone like it was three feet tall, he was great. My favourite cars were probably an old police one complete with a little police officer marionette hanging from the rear view mirror, and one with a tiger on the roof (click tiger face above) which I was informed by its biggest fan was from North Wales in the 1950's, to me it just looked like a modern stuffed toy from a corner shop. We had a bit of a sit down on a railing and what should appear from a parked car window but a baldy bodied, hairy-toed, curtain-haired snaz dog. He seemed bored to death and was happy to pose for a few pictures in between crying and dashing around the back seat. He was actually pretty good lookin' but most of the pictures were out of focus cause he was fast as lightening so he is unfairly represented by the photo below.

I just realized that I've written another post about dogs which wasn't the intention, what I really love about this kind of event is that they are chockablock with ENTHUSIASTS. In this world there are too many people that go through life with no interest in things, they finish school and go straight into a dead end job and that's their life. Get up, go to work, come home, watch TV. I'm not dissing that life because it can happen to anybody, millions of people are a victim of circumstance and that is a real sad thing. I love when people talk about something and there is passion in their voice, the transport festival is perfect for this, everyone that has brought a vehicle wants to talk about it, they want to tell you everything about it and i mean EVERYTHING, for someone with no interest in cars (me) you may think this could be boring but its the complete opposite, it's great.

There was music, it sounded terrible, there was no way we could leave without inspecting. We got to the marquee and the first thing we saw was two townies in all their tracksuit glory dancing, waving their arms in the air and singing along to Sweet Caroline, singing it was the one, the only 'Real Diamond', I'm no Neil Diamond fan but this tribute act was absolutely brilliant and the highlight of my day, he was like the dude in Only Fools & Horses that sings "cwyyy-yyyy-yyyying over you". Seriously, he was brilliant. He had the hair of a star, the shirt of a cowboy, the backing of a pub band and the trousers of a tramp. You know when you take everything out of the washing machine and there is a sock missing? Well I think I know where you can find them, if they aren't in there then he was packing some serious heat (click on the picture for a closer inspection)

We had allowed ourselves time to pop to Morrisons before the bus came cause I had to stock up on Potato Crunchies (four packs) and Diced Carrot & Turnip (ten tins). It was much further away than I thought and my bad back was killing by the time we got to the bus stop. In Morriston we were lucky enough to wait at the bus stop with another guy who enjoyed talking to himself as well as stinking of booze and having a big weeping wound on his forearm. Man alive them Crunchies tasted good.


(Click on photos to view them bigger)

MP3: Red House Painters: All Mixed Up From Songs For a Blue Guitar
(First person to post a comment with the relevance of the song to this post wins a cool prize)