We had stayed overnight at my Mum’s  in Buckley to be nearer to this event as it was a long way from home. We had gone to this last year and enjoyed the venue although the weather had not been too kind to us, and we were promised a fine day this time.

So an early start, although not quite as early as we had intended as my phone had run out of juice, the alarm had not gone off and we were still sleepy from our sunrise adventure the day before. But we were away by 7.30 and arrived at Lytham Hall at about 9.00am. We parked up on the Total Mini stand and soon met up with RVW and Storm who we hadn’t seen for ages. A brew and a bacon bap was in order so we made our way to the little café at the back of the Hall, and took time to catch up.

We were greeted by some Star Wars characters as we came out and and i was really impressed with the uniforms. The helmets had a built in voice changer which sounded really cool. I asked but Peanut said no to me getting an outfit. We then took some time to prowl around the trade stalls. Me and Mrs P were both drawn to The Speed Factory stand where there were some white alloys for sale at a very reasonable price. We wanted our new Paceman to have white wheels from new but they are no longer an option, so we thought this would be a good opportunity to fix this. Sadly he had none in the size we needed, so we shall have to search harder.

As we walked down the driveway of the Hall and admired the cars, we realised an old friend from our European MINI jaunts was coming towards us in his new coupé. It was Spaci from Switzerland who was visiting friends in Birmingham and thought he would drive up for the day and It was a lovely surprise to see him after such a long time. Storm, RVW, Spaci, Peanut and myself Beastmaster – all legends in the MINI community and we knew so few of the other people at the event!

After lunch we browsed a bit more and got chatting to some Paceman owners and the afternoon became very warm and sunny, so we had an ice cream and then a rest in our new padded chairs. A few more photos, this time Peanut’s thoughts turned to more artistic creations, although some of us took the whole thing more seriously than others, as you can see below!

We had a long journey home and so we bid farewell to Lytham Hall, said goodbye to the legends and with our MINI love satiated for the time being, set off on our way home, just noticing in the nick of time that we were about to drive off leaving our new chairs on the grass behind us! To have lost them only a day after buying them would have been a sad end to a lovely day. This is a lovely venue for a MINI Meet and we really hope it establishes itself as a regular feature on the MINI calendar.