Monday 2 June 2014

99th Supports Dreamflight at their Family Fun Day, BA Concorde Club - Sunday, 1st June, 2014

With members of Dreamflight's Simpsons Group aka as The 118 Group as they get ready to take part in the event's Its a Knock Out tournament.
Regular readers of my blog will know that the 99th Garrison supports a charity called Dreamflight.  Dreamflight is a registered UK charity that changes young lives through taking children with a serious illness or disability, without their parents, on the holiday of a lifetime to Orlando, Florida.   See www.dreamflight.org for further details.

For the second year running, we were invited along to Dreamflight's Family Fun Day held at the BA Concorde Club, Cranford in Middlesex.  This is a lovely family based event at a great venue which also is the home of QPR's Academy. 
Something not quite right with this photo? ! lol

With members of Dreamflight's Scooby Doo Group from Northern Ireland
We were due to troop from 12 noon until 4pm ish and therefore met up with the others at 11:00am.  I say "others" but there were only four of us at this troop and we were made up of two members of the 99th [myself and Jeff Vader] and two members of the MK Garrison who kindly agreed to assist us at this event[Andy and Craig]. It was also good to see Jeff's daughter Kayleigh again.
With some of the camera men for Dreamflight


We were given the Club's changing room as our base for the day and made our appearance at 12 as planned.  The event had only just opened at this point but was already quite busy.  The weather was lovely [after a week that had been a bit hit and miss] and this drew out the crowds.
One lady came up to us and asked if Lord Vader would hold her "tiny" baby ... and she was so tiny... her little hands.... awwwww

Lord Vader shows his softer side
We were kept very busy with lots of little excited children running around wanting their photo with us, to hold our guns or just to hug a leg!!  This time around, we were also asked to collect and am very pleased to say that despite our small number, we collected a very respectable sum of £99.04.  Thank you all.
With Pat Pearce MBE  [Founder member and Dreamflight Trustee] and other Trustees and staff from Dreamflight's Head Office.
We also took the opportunity to have photos taken with the groups from Dreamflight who were there taking part in the Its a Knock Out Event, this included a group from the Army and guess who won!
The winning Army its a Knck Out Team
We took breaks throughout the day as the sun got hotter and finished trooping at about 4:15pm.
We then had the obligatory post troop photo but this time, with a well earned ice- cream! Delicious!
We'd been watching everyone else eating ice cream all day... now it was our turn and, of course, it had to be a 99!!
A huge thank you to Katherine Elliott from Dreamflight for inviting us along and to Andy and Craig from MKG and to Jeff [and Kayleigh]