Football, Family and Flypasts

It’s been a little while since our last post so you might be wondering what we’ve been up to.

Well, we’ve actually been up to quite a bit.

We were privileged enough to have my (Pete’s) parents and little brother stay for the last two weekends. The first weekend we didn’t really do that much, just took them to our church and wandered around Tynemouth and showed them the sights.

During the week we attended the Newcastle FC vs Celtic “friendly”.

Glasgow has a pretty bad ‘rep’ in these parts (murder capital of Europe is one bandied around) so we should’t have been surprised to see some scuffles outside the stadium. However when we were doing some filming before going in (you may see that eventually (I have a newfound respect for tv presenters)) a fight occured right in front of Megan. Being the intrepid reporter she is, she tried to film it, but it didn’t work out. Next time Meg!

All up though it was a really amazing experience. It may be the only Newcastle game we go to, so we were certainly making the most of it. I think the result was 4-1 to Newcastle in case anyone is interested.

We knew we were in for a busy weekend with my (increasingly less) little brother’s birthday on Saturday, the Sunderland International Air Show and Newcastle City, Metrocentre and Angel of the North on Sunday.

The Air Show was superb. So many planes, so much carbon emissions.

Funnily enough, it started out with a display which had nothing to with planes. One of the UK Navy’s amphibious units conducted a simulated landing on the local beach.

For someone who had played many hours of the Battlefield series and of course a number of the other WWII shooters, this was especially cool to see the hardware in real life.

The next notable flight was that of the WWI biplanes with the ‘Wing Walkers’. They were pretty cool, but not exactly show stoppers.

At this point, I think the organisers made a big mistake. The next plane on the program (only half an hour into a five hour program) was the Eurofighter Typhoon (not Tycoon as Megan insists on calling it).

This was absolutely astounding. The coolest thing I have ever seen (maybe). I sat there with my mouth open for the entire performance.

The problem was, that after that, nothing else seemed even remotely up to that standard. They should have done this last. Even the two F-16’s from Holland and Belgium didn’t even seem that cool in comparison.

However even though they didn’t get near the Typhoon, there were some other cool performances such as;

The helicopters and…

The acrobatic team.

On Sunday we went into town and visited the Sunday Newcastle market, saw the Millenium Bridge go up, went to the Metrocentre and took the family to the Angel of The North. Megan took another photo. Nice job. Now I just need to photoshop those people out and it would look super-cool.

This weekend we head up to Edinburgh for the tattoo and a bit of sightseeing. Should be uber-fun.