Spring Harvest - Day 1

A busy morning getting ready to go to Minehead for our six day adventure at the Christian Festival called Spring Harvest – our sixth (I believe) visit. Yesterday I had promised Mary that I would take her out for a bike ride but time ran out so had agreed to take her out this morning. At 9.30 a.m. whilst Sara started packing and Tom kept himself to himself in his room, Mary and I cycled to the picnic area in Bentley Wood and back. This only took about half an hour and was about a mile and a half in total. This satisfied her and gave her a good opportunity to stretch her legs on her bike. We left for Minehead at about 1.30 p.m. – about an hour later than we had planned – and after dropping off keys to our cat minders and also returning keys to those we had been cat-minding for, we finally set off. We got no further than Amesbury when we stopped for a KFC lunch. After that, we made good progress and got to Taunton a little after 4 p.m. and feeling confident of arriving at Minehead in good time. However, on the road between that town and Minehead we joined an horrendous traffic jam all the way to the resort and did not finally reach Butlin’s until 5.45 p.m. We then had to shoehorn the car into a parking space which was some considerable distance from our chalet. This year we have one of the older chalets but quite close to the rest of our church family. We did not have time to go to the Big Top for the Celebration this evening so watched some of it on TV before going out for a burger dinner and picking up our study guides from the Spring Harvest stall. Tonight we joined our church family in Maggie’s 6-berth chalet to enjoy wine and nibbles until just before midnight. Being a Christian certainly seems to make the drinking of copious quantities of wine a pre-requisite! We engaged in some interesting and revealing discussions as we demolished four bottles of vino. These evening sessions are as much an important part of the Spring Harvest experience as is the worship sessions, bible readings and study periods. We all should grow immensely through the simple experience of being here, I’m sure. Our newcomers seem to be settling in well although I really didn’t have much opportunity to talk to them tonight as both Jane M and Dawn W went off to hear Jackie Pullinger speak (Jackie is, apparently, a hard hitting missionary doing work in the less salubrious parts of Hong Kong). I am sorry that I missed it and hope that I will have an opportunity to hear her later on in the week. Went to bed exhausted.