A trip to Ardingly

A few months ago I did my first trip to the Ardingly Antqiues Fair. I'd been wanting to go for years, but we always lived too far away. My first trip was only moderately successful as I was overwhelmed and dithered on decisions about purchases. I famously spent the last two hours walking round the showground looking for a chair I'd seen when I arrived... I never did find it!

This time I decided to take Jim as back-up, so instead of spending time trying to text him pictures of things (which is impossible by the way because the phone network is so overloaded!) I could ask his opinion there and then.

Theo came too and we dug the buggy out of the loft as we knew it was going to be a long day with lots of walking. As always there was loads of amazing stuff on sale. A whole stand selling vintage camera equipment. We looked, but didn't buy...

Jim spotted a 1930s wooden model boat. The guy selling it also had some great model aircraft...

Jim spent ages talking to the stall holder, they haggled on price a bit and then he walked away (ahhh!) But then he went back again about half an hour later...  and we got it!

It's so big it doesn't actually fit in the spot we had intended it for, so we will have to put a shelf up just to put it on. We have the original sails which we will have to rig it with at some point.

They had vintage quilts too. I was rather tempted by the yellow and red star one bottom right...

And then there were hundreds of stalls selling all sorts of amazing stuff. We spent four hours there in total leaving at 1:30pm with our pockets empty and the car stuffed. If it was me on my own I could easily have stayed another couple just wandering around and looking at things, but Jim was starting to come over with what he calls "Ikea-itis" - That feeling you get when you've been in a store for too long and need to escape!

Our visit was a lot more successful the second time around. As well as the model boat, we also came away with a new desk for me, another cow skin rug (I have no idea where we are going to put it!) a wicker chair for the bathroom, a couple of storage bits, some model cars for the very patient three year-old who accompanied us and a little wooden step for him to reach the bathroom sink...