The Awesome RAF Museum and the Terrible Cafe therein

On Sunday we indulged my love of airplanes and M’laddos specific love of helicopters by taking a trip down to the RAF Museum at Hendon. For various complicated yet not as interesting as you might guess reasons, I’m a Friend of Duxford which means M’laddo and I tend to get our aircraft fix there rather than at the much nearer Hendon. Duxford is a working airfield, with lots of take offs and landings to excite us both. The RAF Museum is decidedly static but no less impressive for it.
It’s hard to write about one without mentioning the other, so I’ll get the comparisons out of the way now. Duxford is huge. Really massive. It has a Vulcan Bomber and manages to make it look fairly small. Hendon has a Vulcan and it looks really really massive. Hendon has a really cool collection of helicopters, Duxford has a Wessex and doesn’t even have an autogyro (even the DeHavilland Museum in London Colney has one of those!) There, all but the final comparison is done. I’ll save the final one for the end though…
Bizarrely as it’s the RAF Museum, they have some really cool German aircraft. They’ve got a Messerschmitt Me 262 and a Heinkel He 162, which was a wooden framed jet aircraft that saw limited service at the end of WWII. Seeing these incredibly early jet aircraft is really awe inspiring, especially as they have some some very late post war Spitfires which really show the end of one era and the beginning of another.
So all in all the museum as pretty impressive. What was a let down, and caused a huge amount of tears from M’laddo and almost caused me to burst a blood vessel, was the cafe. The queue wasn’t very long but the service was incredibly slow. Slow enough for the wee lass to entirely consume her bottle, M’laddo to come up and check on me four or five times and for me to read all the signs, notices, labels on packets many many times. That’s why I was beyond furious when I finally got to the front of the queue only to find they were the only cafe in Christendom not to take cards at the till. Not that they had any sodding signs to show it. M’laddo burst into long drawn out sobs when it became apparent he wouldn’t be sharing my KitKat and I could have committed murder, standing in queues for 20 minutes isn’t my favourite pass time by any stretch.
So our next visit will be fine, as I’m forewarned of the utter utter utter uselessness of the cafe. That’s if I can convince a traumatised two year old to have a return trip…
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