{"id":58,"date":"2019-09-14T05:47:38","date_gmt":"2019-09-14T05:47:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/?p=58"},"modified":"2019-09-14T06:48:14","modified_gmt":"2019-09-14T06:48:14","slug":"and-were-off-day-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/2019\/09\/14\/and-were-off-day-one\/","title":{"rendered":"And we’re off! Day 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Robin Ewing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

July 6, 2013. Day One<\/strong>:  London to Cologne.\n590 km\/367 miles<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And we\u2019re off! The London launch was brilliant, as the Brits\nlike to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About 13 teams showed up at Horse Guards Parade at Whitehall in central London, a parade area where Henry VIII held jousting tournaments and Elizabeth I threw her birthday parties. Nowadays, it\u2019s mostly where tourists go to photograph the changing of the guards. Today, instead, it was a motley assortment of people driving cars decked out in stickers and flags and passing on advice about the best way to get to Mongolia.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Helen Rand, Tarquin and Boni Baldwin, Dean Cox and Florina\nTrosca helped put the finishing touches on our van, and then we all drove\nacross the mall in a long parade of honking vehicles. Kristi Johnson and\nFrankie Flores came out to wave us off. It was very special to have so many\nfriends there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also finally met some of the other teams:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Alpha Badger<\/a>, who has been scaring me with incredibly\norganized Facebook posts for the last few months, is a friendly dad from Oxford\nnamed Antoine Cutayar. He showed up with a satellite phone, his own team\nt-shirts (we have them too, thanks Jamie) and the most decked out van there\nincluding his own flag and hood-mounted GoPro camera. All of his stickers were\nperfectly aligned and smooth (he even posted his mock-up diagram  with\nproper dimensions online ). Our stickers, however, are all\ncattywampus and full of bubbles from applying them 5 minutes before leaving.\n Dean had to duct tape some of the magnets on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 2. Swallow Clan<\/a>  is\na travelling family team of six. When their youngest  was 2, he didn\u2019t\neven know he had a home in Ireland. He thought he lived in a camper van. Now\n10, he sat on top of the family van for the launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. BangerandSmash Ride Again<\/a> from\nOtley is John Calvert and his wife who are having their daughters meet\nthem for a few weeks along the way. His truck was packed with paper to be\ndonated to schools in Mongola and John was dressed as Where\u2019s Wally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Brighton Bandits<\/a> (from\nBrighton surprisingly) are three boys doing the same route as us. They turned\nthe back of their van into a bedroom so all three of them have to sit up front\ntogether for 8,000 miles unless one decides to sleep in the cave-like back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the rally launch was officially today, the trip actually\nstarted for me last week when I met Dean in Sweden. We took a train to Germany\nto pick up our van and met up with Dean\u2019s friend Albrecht, also a journalist,\nwho kindly hosted us in Hamburg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Albrecht gave us a tour of Hamburg, the best city in Germany he\nsays, which included Reeperbah Street in the red-light district and a bar a\nserial killer used to visit in the 70s with a bedraggled lot of\ndown-on-their-luck people including Rolf who had a Vietnam flashback\nmid-conversation, a smiling woman in a wheelchair decorated with colorful bath\nscrunchies and a sweet-natured toothless woman wearing a t-shirt that read \u201cno\ntouching, only looking.\u201d After dinner we dropped Albrecht off at a church where\nhe spent the night guarding Libyan and Ghanan refugees from neo-Nazis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently, neo-Nazis have also made it to Mongolia, where\nrecently the Guardian reports <\/a>that several neo-Nazi groups have\nbecome environmentalists, harassing foreign-owned mining companies for proper\npaperwork and while referencing Hitler and Nazi-style uniforms with swastikas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The adventure continues tomorrow\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Robin Ewing
\nJuly 6, 2013. <\/p>\n

Day One: London to Cologne. 590 km\/367 miles<\/p>\n

And we\u2019re off! The London launch was brilliant, as the Brits like to say.
\nAbout 13 teams showed up at Horse Guards Parade at Whitehall in central London, a parade area where Henry VIII held jousting tournaments and Elizabeth I threw her birthday parties. Nowadays, it\u2019s mostly where tourists go to photograph the changing of the guards. Today, instead, it was a motley assortment of people driving cars decked out in stickers and flags and passing on advice about the best way to get to Mongolia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/IMG_0007.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlondontomongolia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}