It’s started - One Mother Hubbard of an adventure.

Greetings!

 

So it's started. I have now officially got a place for the great 2010 Mongol Rally. At 2pm today I logged onto the Adventurists website and handed over a small fortune, £704.00, to secure my team’s place. It was all going so well until I received an email telling me that my ‘Payment has been declined’, whoops. My mistake, I had forgotten that our credit card has a £500 limit to it. Anyway, I managed to use somebody else's card, and this went straight through. Payment done, I now have signed my life away, signed all the necessary documents and read all the warnings. Here are some of my favorites. 

> ‘You may end up stuck at the borders of any of the countries you choose to travel through for days or even weeks. You are completely at the mercy of those countries' authorities. You may miss your flights home, you may not get even half way to Mongolia. You will likely find yourself in situations that were not foreseen and which pose you some degree of danger. And you will receive no support should such a scenario occur.’ > > ‘If you are unfortunate enough to become involved in an accident it is quite likely you will be blamed by local authorities for the accident regardless of whose fault it was. At this point you may end up in prison for several years or face very large fines.’

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Reading these warnings made me think. What would I do if I found myself stack between borders for weeks? I guess, I’d make sure that we have brought some board games with us. What an amazing game of Monopoly you could have. You always need more time then you think to play this game, surely two weeks would suffice?

What is so fantastic about this race, it that it’s an adventure, NOT a holiday. It is no simple undertaking. You are deliberately taking vehicles ridiculously unsuitable for the task. Your route is down to you and you have no support along the way. Exactly what an adventure should be about. It’s really not got much to do with getting to Mongolia, it’s the adventures you rack up along the way that count.

So this is the 2010 Mongol Rally, the 7th rally to grace the surface of the earth and it’s going to be by far the best ever. With parties and gatherings all year, launches from all over Europe and lest we forget - one Mother Hubbard of an adventure.

Right, time to find a team, some key supporters and a car (Freecycle here I come!).

 

Tally Ho!