Journey - The Incredible Journey
Duncan Collis
Up at 6.30 am. Finished packing. Drive to Sheffield (_north_ from Chesterfield, grrr...) to pick up Mark, then down to Cambridge to fettle the trailer. Much banging, spannering, socket setting and angle grindering on Wook's new driveway later and we gave up with the intended fettle half done as it was going to be far too hard.
Went to the tackle store to pack. Humungous amount of shit, so Earl + I ran away to get more shit from Earl's house, leaving Mark to pack the trailer. Returned to find the trailer FULL, packed with a mountain of shit rising high above the level of the sides of the trailer. Unfortunately, there was still one and a half times as much stuff lying on the ground waiting to be packed.
Advanced trailer packing methods were clearly required so we constructed a palisade of full tackle sacks standing upright round the edge of the trailer, and then filled up the space in the middle, making a mound which rose up well above the height of the tackle bags (there should be a photo of this somewhere). Got Mark to perch on the edge of the back seat of the car, and stuffed gear in beyond him right up to the roof. Eventually _everything_ was packed except one bag of onions (Earl + Mark both refused to have a bag of onions on their lap), and the connector for the lights on the trailer were less than 2 inches off the ground.
En-route to Dover, Mark realised that his passport was in a bag which we had carefully packed into the trailer. Fquit #1. Then Earl found the Tacklestore keys in his pocket. Fquit #2. So in Dover we had some Chish'n'fips and then team Einstein opened the trailer to rescue Mark's passport, then rang up Caius p'lodge to explain where the keys were, and posted them back.
Mark and Earl both enjoyed 15½ hours of driving across Europe; Earl couldn't move his feet and Mark couldn't move anything (in a traffic jam, we spotted some Germans pointing out Mark's face pressed against the window, and laughing), but did get to know whenever I used the indicators, as the buzzer was just behind his head.
Eventually we arrived and everything was alright. The plug on the trailer lights were only a bit ground down due to scraping on the autobahn. Into the Gasthof for Schnapps, food + bier, which did its stuff. Later we went back to the Gasthof again for a sesh, during the course of which I lost the ability to stand up and staggered around, to everyone's amusement, eventually falling over in the middle of the room.