To Russia, with love

Hi! My name’s Nathan and I spent 28 days driving a 15-year old Nissan Micra from London to Ulan-Ude in eastern Russia with my friend Richard this summer as part of The Mongol Rally. The first thing people ask us (after they’ve said we’re bonkers) is why on earth we decided to do this. Richard has wanted to compete in the Mongol rally since around 2005, and being a caring friend I managed to convince my manager to let me have the time off in order to escort him one-third of the way across the globe.   As a condition of entry, each team must raise a minimum of £1,000 for charity – £500 of which has to go to the official rally charity, ‘Cool Earth‘, which works alongside indigenous villagers to halt rainforest destruction. We decided to donate the rest of the of the money raised to Alzheimer’s Research UK and the If U Care Share Foundation, a local North-East charity set up in 2004 to offer help through prevention, intervention and support of those bereaved by suicide, after Dean and Shirley’s eldest son Dan ended his own life in their bathroom. I live a couple of doors up the street from them, and watched the whole tragedy unfold from my brother’s bedroom window. I would like to tell you all that we spent many hours planning all of the intricacies of our trip and leaving no stone unturned in our preparations … but this would be far from the truth! We split our duties in to ‘admin’ and ‘car...
Source: UNISON Health care news - Category: UK Health Authors: Tags: Blogs charity Members Source Type: news