Day 17 July 20th 2022
Today I was joined by Deanna and Andreas, as Ally had to
return home for the day as her mother was unwell. The original plan was for use
to give Ally a lift to Stafford station so she could catch a train to
Birmingham New Street. However,
Birmingham New Street has closed due to electrical problems and no trains were
running between Stafford and Birmingham, Ally was driven to Birmingham by one
of the spare drivers. As an organisation the Commonwealth Games/QBR took good
care of its staff.
It was an unexpected pleasure to be working with Deanna
again. She and I had both been volunteers on the 2014 QBR in Scotland, Host and
Driver respectively and had worked together on a couple of days. Neither of us,
in 2014, could have expected to work together again 8 years later on another
QBR. Andreas was with us as chaperone for the underage BB that we had today.
We left Yarnfield Park around 9:30 and headed for Stafford
to refuel, After the previous problems with the Shell fuel card, knowing that
it worked at Shell filling stations and Stafford had the nearest Shell site on
our route. The Shell site post code was
entered into the Sat Nav, once again it didn’t disappoint us and set us off on
a route that, at times, was quite narrow but fortunately we never encountered
any oncoming traffic. As the following video shows.
Whilst it seemed a rather muddled route at the time,
consultation with a map later revealed that the Sat Nav had done its best to
make as direct a route as possible.
After refuelling it was a straight run done the M6 towards
Cannock and Chasewater Park. We had been told to avoid the M6 Toll as this is
quite expensive. We disobeyed the Sta Nav and stayed on the M6 when it told us
to go on the M6 Toll, then blindly followed the Sat Nav’s directions as it took
us 10 miles down to the next M6 junction at Walsall, turned us round and took
us 10 miles back up the M6 to the junction with the M6 Toll – so we didn’t
avoid the toll. We should have looked at a paper map. We arrived at Chasewater
in plenty of time and were able to have a snack and coffee in the cafe with the
other QBR crew that arrived a little before us.
The Baton was going to do a circuit of the park and then be
carried by a wake border on the lake. This looked as though it might be rather
hairy so Andreas spent some time with the 12 yr old BB who was to handover the
baton to the wakeboarder, which required the young BB to walk 50 m along a flexible
jetty comprising small floating plastic tiles - each tile roughly the size of a front door mat.
Everything went very smoothly, the young BB walked down the
jetty handed over the Baton to the wakeboarder who then performed some amazing
tricks whilst carrying the baton including turning somersaults in the air, the
first of which didn’t quite work resulting in both wakeboarder and baton being
completely submerged.
It was time to leave Chasewater and make our way to the next
location, Tamworth. Realising we’d not had any lunch, it was gone 3pm and
shouldn’t take long to get to the next collection point, we decided to stop at
the first Greggs, Costa, Starbucks, KFC, Burger King or McDonalds that we came
across. We reached Tamworth and our collection point without seeing any of the fast-food
outlets. So widened our search to include BP and Shell garages as they often
had M&S or Morrisions attached that sold sandwiches – we were getting
desperate.! A BP garage was spotted and it had an on-site Subway – so Subways
all round!
The Relay route was around rather than through Tamworth,
consequently involved three shuttle buses of BBs. All the roads were closed so
there was no possibility to leave the convoy having dropped off our BBs. As we
approached the final roundabout before the event outside the fire station Deanna
spotted that the council were opening up the road behind us, I was able to
continue around the roundabout and we made our exit.! As we had picked up one
BB needing a ride back, we returned to the collection point before heading for
tonights hotel – the Village at Solihull.
