Six Degrees of Procrastination

Send off Day! The team woke up at 6 o’clock to get showered and finish final bits of packing and get interviewed for a piece on BBC South Today! After a casual drive from Ian’s house, where his parents kindly hosted the team for ambulance maintenance for the past week, we arrived at Woburn Safari park. It was great to meet the other teams and see the other ambulances. After a brief tour round the safari park, we unpacked Rich’s belongings into his parents car before going to “The Bell” for a quick lunch with most of our families. A full belly was the best send off we could ask for and at roughly 13:30 we departed to Dover.

After a rather uneventful ride on the Eurotunnel, we arrived in France and, to our horror, found out the weather was exactly the same! Using Berry’s compass, we then proceeded to drive East along the coast to Dunkirk where we made our first stop. Although it was past 7 and raining, it didn’t stop us from having a stroll round the town and finding a shop for us to buy the evenings dinner.

We then departed for our first night-time destination, Brugges! The weather surprisingly remained rainy in Belgium. Upon nearing Brugges we came off the main road and took the side roads in search for a camping site. What followed was a casual drive around the outskirts of Brugges. The landscape was similar to Holland, lots of flat farmland, with a few cool windmills and barges on the canals. Then, after some computer sorcery from Rich, we arrived at a nice campsite just before 10. We gladly took the only available waterlogged camping spot and after some manouvering of ambulances we settled in for the night. A cheeky pasta, tomato and tuna meal gulped down with a moderate amount of french beer and cider was a good end to a very rainy first day.

We are delighted with a donation of toys from the Toy Barn in Sherborne, Dorset. We will be donating these to children along the way, with any left over going to the charity at the end. The Toy Barn, based at Blackmarsh Farm in Sherborne, is owned and run by husband and wife team, Amanda and Peter Hunt, and is a unique toyshop with a great selection of kids toys to choose from.

Here’s a few words from them:

The Toy Barn specialises in out door play and kids climbing frames, as well as garden games and traditional kids’ toys. The shop also runs birthday parties for boys and girls in the orchard or on the Go-karts in the barn and on the farmyard. You can visit The Toy Barn on the A30, just east of Sherborne at Blackmarsh Farm DT9 4JX. You can fine more info on the Toy Barn Website.

After the horrible and painful removing of the old signs we are incredibly pleased to show everyone our fantastic new signs courtesy of GRS Signs. I think you will agree the improvement of the vehicle’s appearance is phenomenal!

We would like to thank GRS for their fantastic help and work towards these signs! We would also like to thank everyone who has sponsored us recently, we couldn’t possibly get these vehicles to where they are needed without you!

Finally we would like to present A&E – Adventure & Endeavour, our two ambulances, along with most of the team!

For the past 5 days the team has been busy stripping the old signs off the ambulances. This turned out to be a mammoth task and took well over 40 hours to do! It turns out removing 8 year old stickers without removing vehicle paint is a painstaking process. This was not helped by only owning one tool to do the job, a butter knife ( which Berry swears is a family heirloom ……ooops).

The reason for removing the old signs is to make way for the brand new ones which will give the vehicles a more ambulance-y look as well as adorning our sponsors!

Today we took delivery of the team clothing! T-shirts and Hoodies with the team logo across the front and website across the back. We now look even more prepared than we are feeling! Many thanks to Signature Leisurewear for helping us sort out these garments!

Thanks to the lovely people at Cinch, we now have a plethora of tents! As you can see from the festival at 134, these tents are looking fantastic and will definitely provide some shelter from the elements.

We are pleased to announce that we have purchased a SPOT Messenger! The SPOT Messenger is a GPS device which is able to transmit its location via satellite back to the UK and onto the internet. One of the SPOT Messenger’s features is tracking, which reports the location of the device every 10minutes back to the UK.

Having so many Engineers in the team, we have managed to get the location reports to appear on the website at Real-Time Location. This will allow you to watch our journey progress in real-time as it unfolds and see exactly where we are! As well as Tracking, the device also provides S.O.S Beaconing for emergencies and other features used to keep people updated.

On Sunday, Berry, Matt and Alex will be cycling the 54 Miles from London to Brighton for the British Heart Foundation. They will be testing the Tracking system for the day so if you fancy watching their progress be sure to look any time after 8:00 am 17th June  at Real-Time Location !!!

Last Friday, 8th June, four members of the SDOP team (Berry, Ian, Rich and Neil) went over to the Isle of Wight to receive a fantastic donation from the Faith, Hope and Charity charity shop based in Totland. Faith, Hope and Charity donates to many charitable causes and we feel very honoured that they would help us with our journey!

To see more photos of the team receiving this awesome donation (monetary and dimensions of cheque) head over to the gallery!

P.S I also hear the cycle over to the Isle of Wight was a pretty intense battle with the wind. Pedalling to be able go down hill sounds like an interesting experience!

The distinct lack of blog posts in the last two weeks has been caused by the whole team being busy with exams and courseworks. However the entire team are now enjoying the freedom of being Graduands (Except 3rd Year Alex). Thankfully this means we can get on with really sorting out all the equipment left to buy and kitting up the Ambulances!

Today, after a nail biting five week wait, we received our passports back from Real Russia. They now contain 5 Visas, without the Turkmenistan visa that we will get after the ferry crossing, that we will need for our journey!

We would like to thank ‘Real Russia’ for being so helpful and professional with sorting out all of our Visas for us. If anyone is looking for a company to help get Visas for Russia or any other Asian country, we highly recommend them!

Sorry for being late with the blog update. Everybody is in the middle of exams, final projects or important modules, so we are all being stressed with work. A few fun things have happened over the past few weeks. We have secured an interview with BBC Radio Solent on the 6^th of July, where Greg and Alex will spread the Procrastination word over the airwaves. More details of when it will exactly be played coming soon.

We have purchased 7 fold-out chairs for the trip which have all been fully customised. We have bought an awesome video camera so we can more accurately document our antics on the trip. We acquired am EEEPC, which is a netbook that is good for blasting out the tunes on route and also keeping the blog updated when there are no internet cafes nearby. Lastly we now have super comfy hammocks for chilling in the Asian sun.