Lurch becomes Monty

You might recall that whenever I lifted off the gas, particularly when going downhill, my Discovery would gently weave from side to side in a slightly scary way.....and that was why we called him Lurch.  But the other day I invested the huge sum of £35 and purchased two quality rear shock absorbers (even including courier delivery!) which my navigator Neil and I decided to try and fit ourselves. I googled and found a really good set of instructions complete with photos and at 0930am on a fine day last week we started. Unbelievably the old shocks came off easily, and the new ones fitted straight on. We were celebrating in Costa Coffee just after 11am, and I even bought Neil a huge scone (but no jam, I'm not made of money) which he was able to eat whilst simultaneously complaining about the various muscles he had damaged taking the heavy wheels off. We had to use a very big wheel wrench with a piece of scaffolding pole slid on it to get enough leverage to remove the nuts. I reckon I saved over £100 by not having a garage do it, so I was very happy. Almost deliriously so in fact, which manifested itself later on when I found myself paying for lunch at the Otterburn Mill. We had driven there despite heavy rain to test the new shocks and see if the weave had gone....it had! I had never really gelled with the name Lurch, despite loving the Addams Family, and now that he didn't do it, I wanted a new name.

Before travelling to Normandy I had put two military stickers on with the insignia of  XXX Corp who were under the command of General Montgomery during WW2 so I decided that Monty should become the new name of the vehicle formerly known as Lurch. I actually wanted to call him Rommel after the German general but as he is a British built Land Rover I didn't think a German name was very apt. 
After we had consumed two all day breakfasts and toyed with the idea of trying to fit puddings into the restricted space available in our, how shall I put it, ........ample stomachs, we headed onto the Otterburn military ranges, which you are allowed to explore so long as a large red flag is not flying.  If you do see one then do NOT enter or you may never leave, well not in one piece anyway!
We came across an airstrip where I attempted to take off in Monty but I think you have to go faster than 45mph to achieve flight. Even shouting V1, V2......rotate didn't help. You can see the video on Youtube.  I think the airstrip was used to put targets on, rather than land planes as it is quite short.       

               

 The scenery there is stunning even when it's raining, and you could spend hours looking around but we needed to get back. On the way I tried to turn right onto the A68 but a police car was blocking the way so I drove down to Otterburn village and turned right there, but it didn't help as we soon came upon the emergency services dealing with a three car accident and we had to detour via Bellingham.

I hope the people in the cars were OK. It was a sad end to a good trip out though.