What will people buy....?

The whole sponsorship thing had gone a bit quiet, it started with a flurry of activity and then went down to nothing and no new sponsorship for a few weeks. Luckily Lou has come up with a new idea of selling things on eBay to raise money and then donating the money to charity, so an email was sent out to request anyone to bring in anything that they don't want anymore and Lou would list it on eBay.


This brings up the question of how much crap will people actually buy? Lou regularly sells various things for her family and friends on eBay, she also believes that people will generally buy absolutely anything. I bring this up as I am currently sorting through my collection of VHS cassettes wondering if anybody actually wants this anymore? Also I am looking at these and thinking that I am going to be mocked mercilessly by my work colleagues when I take in my entire collection of Friends videos! Stange how your tastes change as you mature.....

The first batch of items brought in feature some very strange fishing videos, a violin and a collection of glass hand bells

So far we have raised £48 through the sale of the unwanted items that have been bought in. Can't see that getting much above £50 with my collection of Friends videos.

As another update after a trial I am confident that my new bag is big enough to carry everything that I will need for the trip, I am confident of this as I can actually fit myself inside the bag and zip it closed (I do need some help to actually zip it closed though......).

This is my bag, doesn't look much does it (although you will never miss it on the carousel in that colour!).

Me sitting in aforementioned bag

 And now the bag closed!

 In short, I can thoroughly recommend the North Face Base Camp bag should you need to transport bodies anywhere......

I'm off to China from work tomorrow for a couple of weeks and then when I get back am going to try camping in Wales for a weekend, as I have not tried camping since I was about 12 in a freinds back yard it should be an interesting experience.

The Sponsorship

Just to make life easy for anyone who just saw the page title and wants to sponsor us without reading any of the crap I write here is the link:-

http://www.justgiving.com/PaulandDarinaKilimanjaro

And thank you very much :-)!

We had never intended the journey up Kilimanjaro to be about raising money for charity, I was actually incredibly against it. This is going to be an incredibly difficult trek and the additional pressure of feeling that I had to complete it (and potentially killing myself enduring altitude sickness) to raise money for a charity was something that really didn’t appeal! When I had been researching doing the trip there were a few charities that would pay for you to trek Kilimanjaro if you would guarantee that you would raise a few thousand pounds in sponsorship, I really didn’t want to spend time asking people to sponsor me and then chasing people for money afterwards…….

So with all that in mind I would like to introduce you all to the latest member of our team, Louise Fowler.

Great picture isn’t it? There were plenty more complimentary ones but I decided against using any of those.

Louise works with us and is great fun, she also represents the local Multiple Sclerosis Therapy centre to help raise money for them. She asked me about getting sponsorship for the centre a while back but I really didn’t want to for all of the reasons mentioned above.

However…. While doing some more research on Kilimanjaro and trying to find out about other peoples experiences Darina found a link to this blog and sent it through to me:

http://aquavista.wordpress.com/2009/08/

We both found this blog to be a fantastic read, it is the blog of a guy called Chris who completed the trek up Kili in February this year (2010). His story gave me some great information on what I can expect on Kili and what I need to take there. If you have time I really recommend that you read it and if possible donate to his charity as well (after donating to ours first though :-)).

The part of his story when he was climbing the final part towards the summit and the motivation that he had to continue for the people that has sponsored him incredibly inspiring.

So after another talk with Louise we agreed to do the trek for charity. Since then Lou has been fantastic, we set up the Just Giving page at the top of this post and since then Lou has emailed the link out to her friends and family and is also working to get the link on the email address signature of people at work who deal with customers and suppliers as well as getting publicity from the local newspaper.

Hopefully this blog will be interesting for some people too and generate some more sponsorship and interest for our charity.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog, that seems like a reasonably easy place to start.

I haven’t done anything like this before, I am reasonably competent at using a computer (however I am also hoping that this gets automatically spell checked before getting posted) and a member (probably not that much of a user though) of Facebook but generally the internet is used just to keep up to date with what is going on in the world (and definitely not to look at porn....).

The idea of trekking Kilimanjaro started just over a year ago, I wanted to go skiing but could not find anyone I knew to go with (another story), I booked a holiday through a web site that arranged activity holidays for people on their own (now that I am typing it it does sound kind of sad…) and met some people there that had already climbed Kilimanjaro. Over a few beers in a bar (as most life changing decisions are made) they proceeded to tell me about how the trek on Kilimanjaro had been the hardest thing that they had done in their lives, the final walk to the summit involved them walking ten paces then having to stop for a rest and after taking a paracetomol to stop the headache they were then counting down the minutes until they could take the next one. Anyway this sounded like it had the makings of a great holiday so I decided that I would like to try it! They did also mention some of the good points like the view of the sunrise from the summit and also that the suffering was really all worth it at the end for the sense of achievement (hopefully I can let you know about that in the future…).

Once I got back home I started talking to various friends about my plan and got invariably the same response of I must be mad. I carried out some research and found that it was going to cost around £2000 to do the trek and then some (actually a lot as you will see later) more money to purchase trekking clothes and equipment to get to the top.

A couple of weeks after I got home from the skiing trip there was a program on TV about a celebrity attempt to trek Kilimanjaro in aid of Comic Relief, it ran through the training they were all doing along with physicals and the actual trek. The celebrities were Chris Moyles, Kimberly Walsh and Cheryl Cole(from Girls Aloud), Denise van Outen, Gary Barlow and a few others that I don’t remember or just don’t know their names. The program showed a lot of detail of the sights they could see and how they felt. Including as I had been told the lack of breath at the top of the mountain. They also seemed to be complaining a lot despite getting a lot of extra help with a dedicated trip doctor and some of them having their personal day bags carried, from what I’ve read so far I can’t really see that happening on a trek for mere mortals……

For those of you that don’t know Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in the world that can be trekked (rather than others that are higher but need climbing experience rather than just walking), it is also the highest freestanding mountain in the world (as opposed to other mountains that are within a range of other mountains – I had to look up what a freestanding mountain is so I thought I would help you out). It is the highest point in Africa and is located within the country of Tanzania close to the Kenyan border.

So despite the fact that most of the people I talked to about the idea of trekking Kilimnjaro thought I was mad I also managed to find a couple of friends that were interested in joining me, better still one of them had another friend that was also interested, now we were a team of 4!