Unleash the adventure

RACHEL’S ADVENTURES

Rachel’s adventures began as a student, when she hitch hiked to Geneva in a wedding dress for Rag Week. She managed to enjoy half the journey in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith II. The owner of the Rolls and his son were travelling from London to their home in Geneva, and she just got lucky – one hitch for the whole journey. Suffice to say she won the prize for the jammiest student!

As a BBC reporter, she’s wing walked, spent a fortnight with retained fire fighters, and been nightclubbing with the former Home Secretary, Michael Howard – all in the name of journalism. This picture shows the Utterly Butterly aeroplane on which she wing walked, all whilst delivering a news report to camera! The things journalists have to do sometimes for a story…

She’s always loved adventures; swimming with dolphins, climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge, flying in hot air balloons and ski-ing since an early age, Rachel is also a qualified scuba diver and power boat driver. Oh, and she can also reverse a trailer.

But her biggest adventure was driving an old Range Rover, which had formerly been used as a chicken coop, from Plymouth to Banjul in the Gambia. There ensued 3 weeks of fantastic adventures, from navigating across the Sahara desert to finding a hotel serving gin in the dry country of Mauritania! The rule was you weren’t allowed to spend more than £50 on buying your car. This meant it broke down – a lot! So Rachel spent quite a lot of time either fixing the car, waiting for someone else to fix the car or, on one occasion, waiting for a part to be welded from scratch in a back alley shop. She met some very diverse people on this particular adventure.

ANDY’S ADVENTURES

Andy has also had many adventures over the years, from delivering humanitarian aid into Communism-ravaged Albania in the early 1990s, to cheating death by inches on the Hörnli Ridge on the Matterhorn. 

As a former Army officer, Andy has travelled all over the world, including to Northern Ireland and Afghanistan, and as a mountaineering instructor he has also been to some of the highest and coldest places on Earth. The picture below, taken by him, is looking down on the others in the team he was leading, about 100m below the summit of Gran Paradiso in the Italian Alps.

His travels have varied widely, from Far Eastern culture, through Bedouin desert treks, via scuba diving in the Caribbean, to remote icy summits in the Canadian Rockies.  He has also jumped out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes – not once, but 7 times!

He once negotiated a free ride down the Nile on a felucca by promising the captain that he would write an article about his experience for the Lonely Planet guide book – and true to his word, his review was accepted for publication.

What was Andy’s biggest adventure? It’s so hard to say! Getting lost in Albania and stumbling on something he shouldn’t was hairy, leading a team of mountaineering novices over the 3000m passes from Chamonix to Zermatt was immensely satisfying; but the strangest has to be going from the heat and dust of Afghanistan straight to commanding the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. That was surreal!

Andy has definitely Unleashed the Adventure many times over.