Hello!
First of all thank you very much for your sponsorship, it was much appreciated by Kai and I as it allowed us to get off on our little jaunt, and I'm sure it will be appreciated almost as much by our two charities, Amnesty International and the Christina Noble Children's Foundation in Mongolia. The current total is £1570, though since we've finished we've had a small flurry of donations.
Now on to what you have all been waiting for, the results! We arrived at the finish line at approximately 4:57pm Mongolia time on Thursday 8th September, which I make 6 weeks, 4 days, 18 hours and 57 minutes, having done 12,566 miles, or 20,223 km.
In the distance guess Rachel gets a special mention, as the only person to overestimate, however we didn't quite hit the 30,000 mile mark I'm afraid Rachel. Claudio's guess of 8425 miles was just pipped by Sara and Rob's guess of 8454.4 miles. As Claudio said, we certainly did more miles than planned.
In the time guess Larry and Gez both predicted 4th September, just four days off, but my sister Maddy (Sara and Rob's niece, keeping it in the family) managed a guess just 16 hours out!
Prizes will be distributed to those two lucky, or skilled, winners, but if the rest of you would like to send me your address I will post you a (very small) token of our appreciation.
The rally itself went pretty well for us, if you haven't been keeping up our blog is at https://geekout.org.uk/ and a map of our trip is here: https://geekout.org.uk/map/
Back to work for me tomorrow.
Thanks again, Jamie
If you've enjoyed our updates, and haven't already, maybe it's time to think about donating.
My friends and work colleagues are proving to be difficult patrons of poor children. I have since setup a system to punish my colleagues, else God will.
To: london-office@XXXXX
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 07:50:28 +0000
Subject: Mongolian Rally charity fund raising for poor children in Mongolia
Hello all,
Please come to Suite 502 and break the rules of the quiet room. The fine
is 1GBP and the money will all go to https://www.cncf.org Not me, not my
car, not alcohol, not entertaining women, instead it will ALL go to
foreign children.
I am aiming to raise at least 500GBP for the charity CNCF as part of my
effort to bring peace to this troubled area.
https://www.justgiving.com/geekout https://geekout.org.uk/
Thank you in advance,
Remember you don't have to just give, you can also make a bet on a child's life.
As you may or may not know, Kai and I are planning to do the Mongol Rally this July. It's a jaunt in the name of charity, but as it's something that I want to do I feel bad asking friends and family to sponsor me do it. So we've come up with something a mite more fun.*
Here's the deal: for every donation that you make you can enter one of our two sweepstakes in which you must guess how far we will travel or how long it will take us. The clock and odometer stop when we either reach the finish line in Ulaanbaatar or fail completely. Our readings are final. Please be as specific as possible, eg, include minutes/metres. Duplicate entries will be disregarded. The prize will be 10% of the value of donations up to a maximum of £50 for each of the two sweepstakes. We'll also see if we can find some exciting artefacts (or tacky souvenirs) to bring back for the winners. All donations will go to charity and the winnings will come out of our own pockets (hence the £50 limit). Clear? Good.
To give you a better chance at estimating: we will be starting at Goodwood, West Sussex at approximately 4pm on Saturday 23 July. We will be travelling in a car that is no older than 10 years and has an engine of less than 1.3 litres, something like a Nissan Micra or VW Polo, possibly a Toyota Rav4 or one of those little Suzukis (if you have a spare one of these or similar hanging around, let us know). There's just one Czech point (haha) which we leave (I think) on 25 July and then the route is up to us. We plan to go south of the Caspian and Black seas, ie, via Turkey and Iran. We also plan to stop off in Odessa.
Using straight lines this is 6,273 miles. Using Google directions it's 6,723 miles to Korday, Kazakhstan where it stops giving directions. When making our visa application we estimated that it would take us 5 weeks. Last year roughly 2/3 of cars made it to the finish line. Feel free to do more research on the Rally:
https://mongolrally.theadventurists.com/
How to enter:
There is a Just Giving page for each of the two sweepstakes. Donate your money and leave an appropriate guess in your comment. I'm afraid we will not be able to correct mistakes, but hey, you can try again.
If you want to guess at the duration of our journey go to:
https://www.justgiving.com/geekoutTime
If you want to guess at the final distance of our journey go to:
https://www.justgiving.com/geekoutDistance
We have yet to decide when we will stop accepting entries.
If you want to donate but not take part there are also two pages for straight donations:
https://www.justgiving.com/GeekoutAmnesty https://www.justgiving.com/geekout
Donate on either of those pages and you can request slogans to be written on our car, guess when/where Kai and I will have our first argument or who will kill who first and how.
Good luck!
Jamie
* Fun is not guaranteed.