Retired, Re-Tyred & Tired

Posted on 20 Feb 2014 by WH

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the tour. We hope you enjoy reading our journalistic ventures as much as we do writing them, particularly when illuminating miscellaneous triumphs, entertaining anecdotes, tales of mediocrity and gargantuan catastrophes that will afflict all team members in some combination at some point.

Following directly with this narrative (and the title), the first evening of the tour was a bit of a blow-out. As more and more tourists began to emerge from the moist, windy dusk, it emerged that the captain had been held up on departure (with a lot of the team's kit and bags) by a flat tyre.

The team, however, gradually got on with packing and weighing, then rather less gradually once those kit items and bags eventually arrived. I'm sure you want to hear every detail of a group of men squeezing large objects into small spaces, however let's just say it went without a hitch. On behalf of the team I must thank Theresa & Lorraine for providing an excellent dinner in the form of carvery & crumble at The Surrey, followed by essential bacon sustenance in the (very) early hours of the morning.

It turns out there was a hitch, though. Scroll back up to the title... unfortunately one of our band was Missing In Action. Scottish shooting stalwart and serial invader of the top 50 of the Grand Aggregate, Sandy Gill, now aka 'Bravo Two Tours Zero' had been forced by his employer to pull out of the venture, the day before departure. Joking aside, Sandy would have been a great asset to the team and as a result, we're all going to have to pull harder without his talent and experience amongst us. Sandy has also never read such a nice sentence written about him before until now.

Once successfully through security at Terminal 3, each team member was tasked to source a bottle of single malt for our hosts. We were certainly well armed when boarding the aircraft. It was soon announced after take-off that there were several seats available with extended legroom; as soon as the seatbelt light was extinguished, it doubled as a starting pistol for two-thirds of the team to sprint down the aisle in order to shotgun this rare luxury. However, upon learning that these seats incurred a thirty pound upgrade fee, the team proved their Scottishness with even more alacrity on evacuating the area to return to the original dwelling places in the back.

Upon landing in the afternoon we managed to secure an odd assortment of vehicles, after a great deal of effort and two and a half hours dealing with Hertz, who had clearly failed to set aside the three minivans we'd ordered and who managed, by the end of it, to leave the sole #1 Club Gold member with the drabbest conveyance. The team were then transported nearly 200 miles to the Harris Ranch in Coalinga - home to the famous cattle & resulting steaks that make the area famous. Some took longer than others to get there. After 26-28 hours on the go (for London and Edinburgh departures respectively) there really are no prizes for guessing what was on the agenda: SLEEP.