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Sun Run - or tapping you up!


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Not sure if this should go in this form or international but nevertheless.......

 

After taking a one year break in 2013 my troop's annual charity fund raiser, the Sun Run, is back. my merry band of scouts will be up all night on 21 June taking part in the Sun Run, an over night run, trek, crawl or whatever else it takes to cover the 18 miles from the city of Ely, along the river Cam back to our HQ in Cambridge. Setting off on the dot of sun set, 9.34pm, they will be aiming to finish before sun rise at 4.38am the next day.

This year they are raising money for Child's Play, a charity who provide games, toys and generally try to brighten the lives of children in children's hospitals and hospices. While they are mainly a North American charity they do also support a number of children's hospitals in the UK and we have asked that our fund raising supports the nearest of these to Cambridge, Sheffield Children's Hospital. You can view the hospital's wish list here

This charity was chosen by the scouts themselves and their desire to do something for kids who are not as fortunate as themselves is to their credit.

If you are able to sponsor this event you can do so via the scout group website here. Remember that some of the scouts doing this are just 10 years old!

Thanks you in advance for your generosity

 

Love and hugs from across the pond!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Am actually a bit familiar with that area. My pen friend lived in Chatteris and worked in the library in Ely way back in the 60's. When I visited in 1967 on leave from Germany, I spent a week with her family and got the grand tour. Enjoy and good "tapping".

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Am actually a bit familiar with that area. My pen friend lived in Chatteris and worked in the library in Ely way back in the 60's. When I visited in 1967 on leave from Germany' date=' I spent a week with her family and got the grand tour. Enjoy and good "tapping".[/quote']

 

 

You may even know the route we are taking then, straight down the east bank of the river as far as Waterbeach then over to the west bank. Avoiding the cows as we go! I don't think much has changed since the 1960s beyond it being less militarised than it was. Still a big airforce area, both RAF and USAF but a fraction of what it was in the Cold War.

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So thought I'd do a report back now that my body clock is back to normal as this is a night that will live for a very long time in troop legend.

 

So what happened?

 

We departed Ely as planned on the dot of sun set, and for some hours nothing much of note happened. We split into 3 groups for fast, medium and slow paced scouts and made our way south.

 

First incident around midnight. At a check point, where the track met a road and our support team had set up a check point, two girls felt the call of nature. They went off behind a bush, out of site of the track, and did what they needed to do. Alas they had not appreciated where the road was and as they squatted a police car happened to come up the road and caught them in their head lights. Now while it was not the crime of the century the local constabulary are always going to investigate the presence of two 12 year old girls squatting behind a bush in the middle of nowhere shortly after midnight. All was dealt with by adults present swiftly but still an incident that will raise a chuckle!

 

A couple of hours later and a communication break down..... Exact cause is still a little unclear but one of the check points ended up setting up in the wrong place, to be precise in the car park of a pub that we had not spoken to in advance. Result was a rather irate owner appearing, quite reasonably, in his dressing gown in the small hours and demanding that our support team get lost. I spent Monday afternoon on the phone to him smoothing some ruffled feathers. All is now good and in fact we have been invited back to use his car park as a check point in the future (if we warn him in advance!) in the future, in fact we have been recommended by him not to use the intended check point as it gets very muddy and cars get stuck! Very nice man, pity about circumstances on initial introduction.

 

Approaching Cambridge and I get a phone call to say that the rear group had become "geographically inconvenienced".

 

Moving swiftly on.......

 

Coming through Cambridge itself the group I was with witnessed an incident that at first seemed serious. I though we were witnessing the after math of a stabbing. A man, in his early 20s at a guess, approached us, with no shirt on and clutching his stomach. Clearly distressed and in a lot of pain he moved his hands to show a horrific looking wound to his stomach. Convinced this was a stabbing I called for an ambulance and police. As things unfolded it turned out to be someone very drunk who had somehow managed to become detached from his own colostomy (I think) bag. Seeing a young woman in a little black dress run as fast as she could in towering heels with said bag in her hand shortly afterwards is something that I am not sure should feature on Jeremy Kyle or Monty Python or both.

 

So what did you do on Saturday night?

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Well, this beats anything that I could possibly say about Son #1's wedding. But since you asked ... just about when you were coming to the rescue of a drunken disorderly ... The dance really started to "light up" as DIL and I started handing out glow sticks. (As I learned from an all-night scout climbing event a month earlier, things always go better with glow sticks.) What made that part of the evening special for me was memories of these former venturers dancing on the beach years ago.

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