Wow, thank you everybody! I will need to bookmark this thread to get everything useful out of it. We were thinking there would be several Americans at the Marillion festival. The advice on not getting a car until we are out of London sounds right for me, as does the idea of driving by Stonehenge. My husband apparently speaks fluent British body language, last time he was there people kept stopping him to ask for directions. This should be fun!
If you want to go Stonehedgewards, arrange the car from Gatwick, which makes you better positioned for the M3 which takes you that-a-way. (BTW Gatwick isn’t on the tube, but has a frequent train service from Victoria station.)
Watch out for the M3 on a Saturday morning or Bank Holiday though, especially as it bottlenecks towards Stonehenge. You’ll be sat in traffic for hours like we were last year.
the berserker’s got a point - the roads will be a wee bit shitty if you’re over on a bank holiday.
The Marillion Weekend is a couple of weeks before Easter, so traffic shouldn’t be a particular problem.
Do the Marillion people take over the whole camp or do they share it with ordinary Butlins folk?
Will there still be red coats?
Will the organist play “Grendel” in the main ballroom?
Will there be carpet bowls?
These are the questions that need answering
This Marillion thing at Camber Sands like the ATP shows I can’t afford to go to?
Wow, this is getting ever more complex. What is Butlins? I thought it was like a motel, but I heard the word campers? I have no real clue what the Marillion weekend is like, I have never been to it. I am imagining something like a “Star Trek” convention for rock fans, but with fewer LARPers. I have haerd of the M-3 even here in the states, and I fear it. I think I saw it in “28 Days”- you could just barely see all the traffic held back in the distance on the supposedly deserted road scenes.
Butlins. It’s a ‘holiday camp’ - created from the 1930s onwards, as the first holidays available to the masses. A good explanation here. Most people’s knowledge of them nowadays, however, comes from an old sitcom.
Oh, and in 28 Days Later that was the M6 south of Manchester - be thankful you’re not driving that way…
Butlins is a holiday camp - ie cheap all-inclusive holidays for the working classes. I looked on the site and you don’t have the whole camp so you will be rubbing shoulders with the British hoi-poloi, to the mutual bemusement of both I suspect.
what it means in practice is you can use the leisure and amusement facilities as well as whatever progrock-based activities you have laid on.
If you have knobbly knees you could win a prize.
Hi-de-hi proggers!
If there are non-progfans there, that is good. Prog rock (at least here in the States) has one of the few fan groups that makes science fiction look estrogen-heavy.