Madhouse diaries : Vintage vehicle rally in the town centre

Life has been a blur lately - what with having stupid amounts of end-of-year marking to get through plus a sudden burst of activity on my family tree research that has had me transferring everything over to the Ancestry website to connect with other distant relatives, I haven't been taking much time to blog much lately, so I have about a month's backlog of days out and recipe posts to share. Oops ! 

This day out was actually a month ago and was one of the first sunny days we'd had so we couldn't resist popping into town to check out the displays of vintage cars and vehicles that were parked in strategic locations around the town centre. The first ones that we looked at didn't look that old to me, but maybe that's just me showing my age !

There didn't seem to be much logic to the way they were set out because right next to them were the oldest vehicles.

Some of the owners had added vintage accessories, such as these old fashioned suitcases in the roof rack, which really helped imagine how old they are.

 Others looked more like life-sized versions of children's toys !

There's something about round headlights that always make cars look happy - or is that just me ?!

There were also a few military vehicles from the Operation Dynamo museum.

With Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk movie coming out this summer, the town is really highlighting its links to the past and World War II.

I'm not sure this boxy shape would be very popular today - it looks like a coffin on wheels !

 As we headed around, we bumped into a couple of policemen - the one on the right was French but the one on the left was pretending to be English, which totally confused Pierre ... especially when he told him (in broken English) that he could pet his pretend dog ! I think Pierre was trying to work out if he was totally crazy or just playing a game and he certainly wasn't sure either way ! A bit further on, we moved from policemen to firemen.

The fire engines don't seem to have changed all that much over the years.

The sirens weren't very hi-tech in the olden days though !

After a while, I started looking at the people just as the much as the cars.

 There were so many men standing around contemplating them like they were utter works of art, making enthusiastic noises when the proud owners opened the bonnets to show off the engines. Not something I can ever get excited about really but each to their own !