I think that it was almost a year ago that my little brother asked me and my other 2 brothers to come with him to Tankfest in the summer of 2018. He's a real tank-nut and is a big fan of the game World of Tanks. Me, not so much, but I do like tanks and when I thought about it ... I've never really done any roadtrip with them (apart from all the vacation car-trips together as kids) so that looked like fun to me too.
I had never heard of Tankfest before, so I had to look up what it actually meant.
The website stated : The world's biggest and best live display of historic armour, living history, and much more at the Home of the Tank - The Tank Museum, Bovington. Presented by World of Tanks.
We decided that we would seek out a cheap place to crash since we'd only be sleeping there. The rest of the time would be spent on the site itself. My brother had found a place to sleep called The Lodge in Bournemouth and I had booked the tickets for the Ferry transfer at Calais in France since were going to travel by car.
Traveling towards the ferry was a bit stressful. Even though I thought that we had enough time, as soon as we left (friday morning) my car redirected the route by skipping any toll-booths along the way. This, including the traffic jams ahead would mean that we would be arriving way past boarding-time. The navigation on my car wasn't being helpful at all so we changed to navigation by mobile phone. Waze to the rescue! We managed to save some time by navigating with that app.
Upon arrival at the Ferry, we had exceeded the check-in time. Only a few minutes left before boarding the ferry itself, but to our surprise they'd let us check in without any problems or remarks and we could join the queue (which started to board the ferry the same second we joined the queue.). Next time... I'm going to calculate more time to travel so it won't be so stressful next time.
The photo's that I took starts on the Ferry, even though I did shoot some while traveling towards the Ferry. While on board, my camera started to show some strange behaviour and it suddenly started to format my sd-card. bye bye photo's.
We took the DFDS Ferry
The Lifeboats (you never know if you'd need them...)
Arriving in the UK means sailing along the White Cliffs of Dover
Almost arriving at the docks
The bridges to connect the ferry to the mainland.
I can't close off part 1 without leaving a few Tanks in this post that I encountered at Tankfest!
This concludes Part 1. I hope that you've enjoyed the story and the photo's.
I have aprox. 300 photo's left to review and process, so there will be more parts to come. (with lots of Tanks!)