What, who and why?
What?
In summer of 2025 we are are driving from the UK to China in aid of the Make a Wish Foundation. We'll be travelling through 18 countries and covering 10,000 miles and doing it all in 30 days!
Our Team - Andy - "Clipboard"
Well I wasn't best pleased with the nickname so I'll add coming up with a new nickname to my extensive and extremely well organised list of things to do for this trip. I'm looking after logistics and making sure we've got everything lined up to have the best chance of getting through this marathon journey on time and in one piece.
Super power - Is pretty much always right
Weakness - Intolerant of chaos
Our Team - Richard - "The Fixer"
Rich is the mechanic. He's got years of experience getting anything with engine to work properly. Cool, calm and collected Rich will not be fazed by anything that goes wrong.
Super power - Can talk his way out of anything
Weakness - Can talk himself into a lot of trouble
Our Car
I guess we could do this in a Land Rover or a typical 4x4 but where is the challenge in that? We'll be taking a bog standard 2007 Porsche Cayenne S with 115k miles on the clock. The only thing we've changed is wheels and tyres to cope with the varying terrains we'll have to cover. Madness I hear you say but the Cayenne is way more capable than people give them credit for. Parts might be a little tough to come by along the way but we're taking a reasonable number of spares, WD40 and duct tape. What more could we need?
The Route
Kicking off our journey just outside of Swindon in England we'll be heading down to Folkstone to jump on the train to France. From there we whizz down through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria. Here's where it starts to get interesting (not that Belgium isn't interesting). We'll head into Turkey and go through Istanbul where east meets west. Both Rich and I have been to the far east so the next set of countries are ones that we've only ever flown over. We'll go through Georgia and into Azerbaijan where we catch a ferry across the Caspian Sea. Then we get into "The Stans", Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. A quick blast through western China and we're into Mongolia before heading south back into China where we finish up in Shanghai.
Fundraising
If you have the chance to make a difference to peoples lives then you should. So we're going to raise as much money as we can to support an extremely worthwhile charity. We're funding this trip ourselves so every penny raised goes to the charity.
Please donate whatever you can.