Scotland is still here then...

With such great weather in September, Ian is doing a great job painting the boat.  Now we have
four coats of primer, four coats of undercoat, and he is now starting on the top coats.

The boat should be quite a bit heavier with this thickness of paint on it :-)

I had a quick trip up to Edinburgh to collect some beer for the approaching beer festival.  The thing I love about driving in Scotland is, other than the fantastic views, the fact that there is no traffic.  Having spent 7 hours the previous week driving the 220 miles to the armpits of the UK, Stevenage, it is a real pleasure to drive along, at rush hour, without another car in sight, and spend little over three hours driving the 220 miles to Edinburgh.

It was time for Ramsbottom Mountain Rescue Beer Festival 2014. Because I had beers from Scotland, we decided to have a Scottish section of the bar, seperated from the English section by a wall.  The only images of a wall I got from t'internet were from Pink Floyd, but they served the purpose.  Scottish flags one side, English the other, but no passport control, yet.

The beer festival was quiet, I think because two other beer festivals locally had moved to the same weekend.  Just to rub it in, a couple of the mountain rescue volunteers behind the bar were called out on the saturday night to rescue two people who had got lost walking home from one of the other festivals!

Loch Ness Lightness won beer of the festival, and we raised £600 for mountain rescue.

Just to correct some of the idiots commenting during the festival, the breweries are paid for the beer, at the best discounted price I can get, we put on the festival for free, staff it with volunteers as much as possible, and pay for all the advertising and running around out of our own pockets.  All of the money taken, once the beer is paid for and the Civic hall is paid for, goes to the Mountain rescue. 
I am not, as several of the idiots commented, "raking it in". If it wasn't for what myself, Sara, Keith and Irwell put into this, the festival would never happen, and the charities would get nothing.  This festival has cost each of us personally several hundred pounds and I know that I have put in about 100 hours to organise this. Last year we raised £3400, which was great, this year not so good.
So, to all you tossers who want to come to a beer festival to moan about everthing and have a go at me for making a fortune, in future I will save myself the 100+ hours of hard graft and give the mountain rescue £600 of my own.  I will be better off, and you will have to find somewhere else to do your wingeing.