Nigel and I love a good Airshow and so we were particularly excited to head off on a train to Farnborough where we stayed in the most expensive Holiday Inn you can ever imagine.  To be fair it was where all the pilots were staying as it was literally 50 metres to one of the entrances to the show.  We woke up nice and early and went off to stock up on sandwiches and water bottles for what was going to be a big long day.

Farnborough Airport is massive and the outdoor displays of the planes went on and on and on.  What was good though in such a big space you never really felt crowded.  We had paid extra to be in a separate area where they provided deck chairs and nicer bathrooms so we headed straight there to find a good spot up on the fence line.

As soon as we sat down Nigel spotted the pyrotechnics in front of us.  The grass was also a very tinder dry shade of yellow after the hottest English Summer since 1976.  “When the grass catches on fire later we need to hope the wind is going the other way” Nigel said.

The show started with all the usual suspects but did include the only flying Lancaster Bomber in the world.  The F16 took off and landed twice in front of us.  The Red Arrows were spectacular with their red white and blue smoke and there was a helicopter that did aerobatics!  First time we had ever seen that.  Nigel was bit disappointed that there weren’t more things that we hadn’t seen before but all in all it was a really good day.

You have to give credit to the people who organise Warbirds over Wanaka though.  The organisation and the choreography at Warbirds was actually better than Farnborough and you can’t beat the beautiful Central Otago backdrop.  But as far as bucket list items this was one of them for us.  We have ticked that box!

Last thing before the end of the show the pyrotechnics did go off.  When we watched the video back later we realised that one of them had fallen over which is why the grass right in front of us caught fire.  The wind was going the other way so we got to watch the fire engines slowly come over while the people on the ground were trying to put the grass out by kicking dirt on it.  We really don’t think that they knew what to do in a grass fire as it caught really quickly.  The Red Arrows were due to take off again and had to wait for the smoke to clear before they could.  It was pretty exciting.

Back to our Farnborough hotel and then the next day back to London.  We had a couple of cruisy days just hanging about and getting ready for our next and final leg of our epic journey.