Home to Drax Sports & Social Club

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Home to Drax

Motorhome Journey from Home to Drax for Yorkshire Folk Dance Weekend

Today we set off from Home in Lancaster to begin an epic trek in our Hymer B544 motorhome. We are approaching 10 years of travel in this particular Hymer, we have worn out a set of tyres driving over 60,000 miles, most of which has been in Europe. This Hymer is left-hand drive, having been imported from Germany where it was originally registered.

We spend the morning packing Hymer: clothes for English dancing, clothes for square dancing, normal clothes for holiday! Food for the weekend, plenty of dried/non-perishable foods for 3-4 weeks, but just enough for the weekend in the fridge as we have a 14-hour ferry crossing on Sunday night. After lunch we drive M6/M61/M60/M62 to Goole, leaving the M62 at J.36 and driving to Drax Social Club beneath the gentle giants: those 12 silent cooling towers. We have been allocated the part of the field behind the social club, we park up on the end and settle in.

After a tea of chicken chilli with rice, then raspberries & cream we walk over to the social club for the evening dance with Liam Binley & Lynne Render. We meet the usual crowd of dancers that we know. When we return to Hymer it is not quite dark, the towers are not illuminated in blue lights this year but Good Luck England and the coat of arms is projected onto the side of one of the towers.

When the event at Drax finishes we take a short drive to Hull to catch the overnight ferry to Rotterdam. It’s always interesting to pass through Rotterdam for me; I designed a lot of the computer control system that originally controlled a large plastic-making plant at Rozenberg nearby. That was a busy time commuting from Manchester to Den Haag, I used to bring coffee and cheese back for the family in Manchester. A strange existence really, living in hotels and working in an English-speaking office; as soon as we left the office nobody spoke English. Needless to say I soon started to learn Dutch, or Nederlands. That was a long time ago, but it sparked an interest in languages that has stayed with me. In practical terms even a few words of a language can be really helpful. As English-speakers we sometimes think that everyone speaks English or at least a little.

Our tours around Europe are mostly into wild places, away from cities, we soon discovered some interesting quirks of language. For example in Spain when travelling in Galicia we found Gallego spoken more than Spanish and in the Basque Country we found a preference for Basque especially in the rural areas.