Becca Jane St Clair

Today my husband (and yes, I still get a thrill saying that) is celebrating his 40th birthday! Yeah, we’re only 4 days apart (but I’m 9 years younger). It certainly makes having parties a lot easier. We had a big bash on the 29th and I’m sure I’ll be posting pics from it soon.

And now I can tell you all what we got him for his birthday! Me, his parents, grandad, aunt, & siblings all pooled our money together and bought him the driver’s experience at Cleethorpes Coast Light Railway! Ben (Tim’s brother) and I had wanted to get him a driver’s experience and we had been discussing it MONTHS ago…but all the places I checked wanted between £300-£600 for the experience…PLUS, they were all located in Wales, which meant that at the very least, Tim and I would have had to travel down to Wales (okay, that’s free on the train for us) and get accommodation somewhere. If anyone else wanted to come with us to see Tim drive, they’d have to shell out the same, so the driver’s experience would have easily started costing the family over £1000. I had thought about contacting friends to see if they wanted to contribute, but in the end, Ben and I had given up the idea and I told Tim we just couldn’t afford it.

Until we were at the Cleethorpes Light Railway last month. I snuck away from Tim (“I have to use the loo…”) and spoke with a secretary who told me their experience was only £150 for the day and it would include an opportunity for family to then ride behind a train Tim drove for free, too. I immediately texted my mother-in-law who agreed that it was a good price and said she and father-in-law would contribute, so I purchased it that day on a gift certificate for Tim to redeem whenever he wants. Even better is they claim “Your day’s training will be tailored to your level of experience, skill and ability”, so hopefully, Tim will really get a great day out of it since he already has quite a bit of experience, skill, and ability when it comes to trains and steam!

We presented it to him at his party…and he was [I’ll edit this in later as I’m writing this four days early. If I forget to update, assume he was surprised and happy]

I can’t wait for him to go!

*Of course, Tim did start to get concerned when my loo break took over 20 minutes. I blamed it on the long queue! Fortunately, there really was a queue as they had forgotten to unlock one of the toilets, so we all had to wait for the only open one.

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