The Great Escape 2010
Emily Mayhew is raising money for Quartet Community Foundation
Participants: Emily Mayhew, Bruce Teatheredge, Lucy James
Story
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
We have all just about recovered from our adventure, which took us all of 324 miles to AMSTERDAM!!!
Here is a somewhat condensed version of our journey:
After getting up really impressively early, we were seen off by some insomniac friends and headed off on foot to the student union.
At 9 o'clock jailbreak officially began and we raced 2 other contestants - a Gorilla and a Banana - down to the train station. Bearing in mind Bruce was in a cow suit, it must have been quite a strange sight.
We managed to rather sneakily get on a train from Bristol all the way to London Paddington and then convince a very kind lady to let us ride with her in her taxi to King's Cross.
After trying and failing too woo the eurostar managers with our cow suit and ukelele (we even got them a flower and they still said no!) we moved on to Victoria coach station.
(Wandering around the underground was surprisingly easy, though one man only let us through only on the condition that we sang something for him on the ukelele. 2 lines of somewhere over the rainbow and he couldn't get us through fast enough...)
We made some polish friends at Victoria but even with their help we didn't manage to get on a bus leaving for some obscure polish city as there were only 2 seats spare.. but all was not lost...
A phonecall to Harwich port, and Bruce's careful negotiations managed to get us 3 free returns to Hook of Holland!!!
so after a bit of a rest and a nice pint in Victoria, we continued on Harwich, were we had accomodation for the night... ie we went to Bruce's house. via a Chinese takeaway.. mmmm
We set off bright and early in the morning and after a short walk to the port, boarded the ferry. Spent most of the time sleeping and making brightly coloured signs in anticipation of road side hitchiking (AMSTERDAM OR GERMANY) , and then decided it was time to start looking for a ride.
Luckily we found Dominic on board, a very lovely Polish man with a white mini van who dropped us of at a petrol station just beyond Den Haag.
We stood in that spot for about an hour, (it was coooold!) receiving a mixture of laughter, abuse and bewilderment from drivers until much to our relief we were picked up by Sahid and Rashid, who happened to be on their way to Amsterdam to visit 'their women' ...
We arrived in Amsterdam early evening with dirty dutch music blaring, feeling tired but really proud and ready to celebrate our acheivement!
All in all it was an amazing experience, and we would really like to thank all of you for making it possible, and helping us raise so much money!!
We came in 3rd as far as competition is concerned, with first place reaching Lyon in France and second place Aberdeen... but we were pretty happy where we ended up and we hope we did you proud!
Photos and Video still to come
Thanks again!
Lots of Love Emily, Lucy and Bruce xxx