Bride-to-be wins £2500 the day before her wedding

A bride-to-be found out she had won thousands of pounds worth of travel vouchers –ideal for a dream honeymoon – just a day before her wedding.

Anna Miners was in her bedroom packing her bags for the trip to Brighton to marry fiance Tim Grainger when she got a call from Bush Tyres in Bourne to say she had won £2,500.

“I was absolutely amazed,” she said. “It was so exciting, it almost overshadowed the wedding.”

A few weeks earlier she had gone to Bush Tyres in Cherry Holt Road to get new tyres for her car. The company was running a national promotion for Bridgestone tyres. Anna accepted the deal and went home to East Lane, Morton to enter the competition online.

“I thought I’d give it a go – to win the money would be brilliant but then, as you do, I didn’t think anything more of it,” she said.

For Anna, 51, it means the few days they spent in Brighton can now be followed by a second honeymoon somewhere more exotic.

“The Thomas Cook vouchers are open-ended so we are thinking of maybe Iceland to see the Northern Lights later this year and then either San Francisco or Florida next year,” she said.

“My husband loves America and I have never been, so he is looking forward to taking me there. This was something we had talked about but couldn’t afford.”

The couple enjoyed a lovely but modest vintage-style wedding with 50 guests at Brighton Pavilion.

“We love Brighton and go quite often for weekends – or even for a day,” said Anna, who is a senior officer for Rutland County Council.

It is a second marriage for both of them – their former spouses died young and neither thought they would ever find love again.

They each own vintage Volkswagen cars and met online on a motoring chat forum. They then teamed up at a car show and three weeks later Tim, 47, proposed.

He is a dental technician working at a laboratory just outside Reading. The couple have two children each from their previous marriages.

The new Mrs Grainger said: “At the moment we are living apart and commuting to each other’s houses at weekends but as Tim loves the Stamford area it’s likely that he will move up here.”

She said they would be spending the vouchers carefully.

“We’re not quite certain what we will do yet but I’ve taken the win as a good omen for our marriage,” she said.

“It is an incredible prize and one I’m absolutely thrilled about. It’s the best wedding present imaginable.”

Anna beat hundreds of other motorists to scoop the top prize in the Take A Break promotion and said she was very grateful to Bush Tyres and Bridgestone.

Bush Tyres manager Liam Cosgrove said: “The competition was very successful for us on a number of levels.

“It was even more rewarding to see Anna’s face when she won and to hear what it meant to her.”