Bedford River Festival

What a day out! Yesterday we joined Laura and Laurence to visit the famous biennial Bedford River Festival. There was such a lot to see and do. 

"The ever-popular Bedford River Festival takes place in July every other year, and will be back bigger and better for 2022. As always, the River Festival is free to attend and offers something for everyone – including live entertainment and activities, a funfair, raft and dragon boat races, plus Pirate Island, the Sports Island and water sports arena. This year the Bedford Festival of Motoring will also be taking over the High Street to present one hundred unique and interesting vehicles."

They were expecting 250,000 visitors over the 2 days! It certainly seemed busy enough.

This is the map of where things were happening.

Here are just a few of my photos.  

We started by heading for the High Street and enjoyed the selection of 100 vehicles in the Motoring Festival, scheduled to coincide with the River Festival. These are two of my favourites... I learnt to drive in a Hillman Imp like this one.

The 'Back to the Future' De Lorean Time Machine was fun, but my pick was the Maclaren 720. "72bhp from a 4l engine with twin Turbos. 0 - 60 mph in 2.6s and 0 - 100 mph in 5.2s", said the specification.

The De Lorean.

They also had some cars converted to electric. The electric engine in this TVR took up only a fraction of the engine space.

When we eventually got to the river, the Jet Boots display was on. Quite spectacular and it looks great fun to do.

The Milton Keynes Brass Band was playing at the bandstand on the bridge. Best music of the day!

We came across a troupe of Morris Dancers. It's amazing how they managed to avoid bashing each others knuckles thwacking their sticks together., especially when they went double speed at the end.

There was an enclave away from the river called the Green Earth Vegan lounge, with interesting craft stalls, food stalls and their own little stage.

Interesting looking food.

I found some tasty nachos that included some beef chilli.

The even had a stall where you could lay on the table and get a massage.

Back down to the river now.

There were plenty of stalls along The Embankment too.

The main arena was in Russell Park, with a big stage, very loud music...

...and some fairground rides.

The Jet Boots came down the river to display here too.

Some people were dressed up as pirates for the day.

Here is someone doing kayak jumping - a water form of ski-jumping.

There were plenty of opportunities for trying out some watersports, but we didn't.

What are these three watching here?

It was the musketry display.

Here we saw one of the dragon boat races. The drummers beat the temp for the crew to paddle all together.

Back at the Vegan village for the others to get some lunch, we just caught the end of this young lady singing.

They all had indonesian vegan rice bowls.

Then it was the turn of the narrowboats to parade.... including this pirate one.

We returned to Laur and Laurence's place, where we had parked, and headed for home at about 5pm. It had been a full day!

But Laura and Laurence went down to the river again in the evening to see the illuminated boats parade. She sent us some pictures - here is one of them.

As I said at the start - what a great day out. A date for the diary then - we will certainly be back in 2 year's time.

You can see more of my photos of the Festival of Motoring here and of the rest of the River Festival here on Flickr.