Sorry for the delay folks, but I'm back. My experience on the Race 2 Paris was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience. I got to meet incredible people from all different walks of life, and the excitement of doing something so different was exhilarating. It also made me realize how incredibly big this island is, and how freaking big this world is. By the time my partner and I reached Paris we were utterly, and indescribably exhausted, 36 hours on the road with 1 hour of sleep, and yet we had only traveled a minute distance on the face of this gigantic planet.
We also at times felt very helpless because, for the first 9 hours of the trip, from 10am to 7pm, we had only managed to get from Edinburgh to Newcastle, which is in the way North of England! 9 hours!! Meanwhile we were in text message contact with a bunch of friends who got rides stretching all the way down to Birmingham or even London. We only managed to get various small rides with locals, and spent a lot of time on the side of the road. When darkness fell in Newcastle, we had only traveled 1o0 miles!
But if your parents ever told you when you were young "to never give up" as mine did, then they were right, because that's when we struck gold. We got a ride to a trucker stop point just south of Newcastle, and with puppy faces and waving our Charity brochures, we asked around. Eventually one of the truckers took us under his wing, a really nice, very thick-accented, heavy chap from Carlisle who offered to bring us to a city called Boston (ironically enough) in Lincolnshire. But it gets better. This guy liked us so much that he called his trucker friends, and arranged for one of them to take us farther south to Canterbury, in Kent. And guess what, in Canterbury that trucker got another friend to take us to Dover. Indeed, we had found the secret to the Race 2 Paris, networking with truckers. But besides that, being with the truckers was needless to say pretty interesting. Rarely do we get to see how the backbone of a nation's economy works in that way. And culturally, it was unforgettable as well.
In the end, we arrived about 50th of 100 groups. The winners got from Glasgow to Paris in 20 hours! The slowest groups got there in about 50 hours. But unfortunately, like many groups, we were forced to cheat a little in the end. It was snowing in Calais, and none of the cars were going to Paris, so half of the groups went to the train station and took a train. The other half waited on the side of the road in the cold, some for up to 6 hours! But all of those hapless folk eventually conceded to taking the train, just some more quickly than others. Sacre Bleu... those unsympathetic Frenchmen!
The race really allowed us to see the European countryside as well. We passed by Scottish moors, the Canterbury Cathedral, the famous cliffs of Dover, as well as all those quiant towns in Northern France where they speak with that funny northern accent. We think of England and Northern France as very industrial places, but in general they are very very beautiful.
On a separate note, I'm not sure if I'm going to be blogging quite so often in the future. I have found that my blog has been quite public ever since the Race 2 Paris and the Oxford conference posts, sometimes appearing up on Google searches before even the official websites of those events. I'll try to keep it updated, but probably not quite as much as before.
But either way, please keep in touch folks. Austin.
The Security Council
