Skip to main content

Flight of Yuri Gagarin

Boys will be boys - even grown men... Dr Fred and his stargazer pal built a rocket, using extremely suspect measurements from eye, guessing heights of ceilings and working out from fire door sizes.... they managed miraculously to make it just small enough to fit in the middle of the Girsby and Over Dinsdale Village Hall to be the 'space'tacular  centerpiece of this years Yuri party!!

We have held a party every April 12th now for quite a few years - the date that Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space - there are parties held all over the world every year - not so many in the UK and we were defo the only one in Teesdale.  We have varied the venue from having smaller bashes at home, parties in friends barns, for a couple of years we did more public events in a bar in Newcastle and this year it was the village hall- set in the middle of nowhere with a camping field right next door - excellent venue! The day coincides with Dr Freds birthday which means even more excuse for a party!!!

Its also the excuse for DJ Yuri Cosmos to play his 27 hour soundtrack of space music although this year we had guest appearances from DJ Horace Zontal and a couple of his pals.  It took all afternoon to set the scene with rocket launching and putting up the 100 metres or so of Yuri bunting I made, hanging the flags and making the cavernous hall look inviting.. There were a couple of dodgy moments when we thought the rocket was too tall and then realised we had spelled BOCTOK wrong - our Russian not being quite up to par...


but by the early evening we were set for lift off - (there is worrying talk of actually trying to launch a rocket next year) but for this year it all just looked very splendid.  As the night wore on fueled by chillie and jacket spuds - good old fashioned Russian Space food - alcohol was consumed and the tunes got better and louder - a couple of space men appeared - but I think there were more aliens then expected!!


We danced the night away - I had to recharge my flashing dancing shoes at least once

 - I finally fell into bed at about 4.30 and people were still dancing - but I'm a pensioner and just cant pull an all nighter anymore - it was a good night but its taking me the whole weekend to recover!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Scotland part 2

The second half of the week continued in much the same vein.  We had one rainy afternoon which was actually quite nice to be holed up in the house with the rain lashing the windows.  It probably wasn't quite so nice for the two visitors that came on their bikes but they're tough cookies - and its only water- but I did feel sorry for them having to cycle six miles back down the track in the wind and rain, but given Scotland,  it wasn't as bad as it could be.

Funchal

So after three days at sea we finally hit Funchal in Madeira.  An escape from the ship, and I have to say it was very pleasant indeed.  First of all the weather is really splendid.  Especially when you know that everybody else in the UK is suffering grim storms and vile winds..  Over here it is between 22 and 25 degrees is really quite warm.    Funchal is a pretty city. It's built on a hill it with lots of lovely white houses with stunning red roofs.   In order to get the best of it we walked along the sea front until we got to the cable car and we took it up the hill.  It was a really good ride much longer than we imagined and it's quite weird because it goes right through the town -  completely over everybody's house...  So not only do you get a lovely vista of the bay but you can view the beautiful rooftops and get to look in everybody's gardens and to look at their picnic sets.. clean washing nice plants... scratty backyards.... We got off th

ROCKS - in which I share the Hopetoun and Esperance pictures....

 I'm about to post a load of pictures of rocks... look away if you are not interested...There are more but its faffy making them smaller to upload so I'm doing it a bit at a time... Enjoy mount Barren rocks on summit Mount Barren Views... Cave Point - unreachable cave Small reachable Cave scree to unreachable cave Frenchmans Peak Cave Frenchmans peak View Frenchmans Peak Summit Esperance Headland Boulders Esperance Headland with fisherman for scale Eperance other headland cave Esperance other headland...