Failbreak!

Last weekend scores of students fled Bristol, aiming to get as far away as possible in 36 hours in the name of charity. Always eager to rise to the challenge, myself and fellow Fresher Oli decided to get involved. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go to plan.

Heading For The Border: Charlie and Oli in high spirits

After a quick browse of hitchhikerswiki.com (surprisingly not a great read), the plan was made that we’d take Harwich Port, near Ipswich, by storm and head to Amsterdam.

Supposedly costumes make you more approachable, so we settled on that well-known combination of tiger (myself) and gingerbread man (Oli). Mike Wasowski from Monsters Inc. was suggested as the ideal outfit but the difficulties of trying to fit a massive green eyeball into cars quickly ruled it out.

Armed only with our wits and some Nutri-Grains, we were ready.

Costumes: Apparently key to Jailbreak success

Setting off at a respectable, if slightly relaxed, start of 9.45, we bumped into a member of Badock who was driving home, who kindly dropped us off at Membury Services 40 miles down the M4.

Here, I managed to get talking to a bunch of Bristolian farmers who turned out to be heading to Twickenham for England v Fiji. These kind fellows offered us a ride to Hook services in their minibus.

As well as a seat each there were complimentary in-drive refreshments: Thatchers Gold cider and Wasabi nuggets.

Drinking with the Locals

Unsurprisingly, rugby was the topic of choice. The small problem with this was that we had no clue there was even a match on that day. Generic comments such as “Should be a good game today” and “Fiji are always good”, while we waited for BBC Sport to load on our phones did not endear us to the crowd.

As the cider reserves decreased, the animosity towards us increased. By the end of the journey, Oli had removed his gingerbread man headgear to reveal to the rugby lads his ponytail. A colossal error from the gingerbread man, leading to the popular chant (in Bristolian accent) “Cut it off! Cut if off! Cut it off!”

This is what is commonly known as a cue to leave.

Guess who drew the short straw?

Meanwhile, the minibus driver, who was also getting annoyed, not by us but by the fact he wasn’t allowed any alcohol, had managed to miss the services. A fruitless half hour spent in an A3 lay-by proved to be the low point of the day.

In response we did as any losing Apprentice team does, and went in search of an establishment serving unhealthy food so we could mull over our failure.

Two large KFC boneless banquets later, the spirits had risen and we were revitalized. It had turned out we were very near to Sunbury train station which had no barriers, so we hopped on a train to Waterloo.

It’s rather hard to blend in with the crowds as a tiger and a gingerbread man. We threw caution to the wind, marched up to the barriers, showed our charity letter saying we were fundraising by doing Jailbreak, and were waved through ending up at Liverpool Street.

From there the letter got us on a train to Billericay, Essex, home of Gavin and Stacey. This led us both to become extremely over-excited, with Oli reeling off a series of Gavin and Stacey-related Facebook statuses which, suffice to say, got very few likes.

Tiger Loose In Essex!

A rail replacement bus from Billericay to Witham, a train from Witham to Manningtree and finally a train from Manningtree to Harwich International Port. Amsterdam was in our sights.

However, Harwich International Port security had been slightly underestimated: it was the Fort Knox of southerly English ports (in our minds at least).

Lesson learnt for the day was don’t judge a port by its website. Said website was fairly medieval, therefore we thought security would be a bit lacking. It turns out becoming a successful illegal immigrant via the Ipswich route is a lot harder than you’d think.

Before we’d even said anything at the Stena Line Ferries desk, the man behind it said “The answer is no”. Apparently they’d had a swarm of jailbreakers try the same thing over the last week. They warned us not to try anything illegal as there were thousand of cameras and “special branch” would get involved if we were caught.

Amsterdam was sadly a bridge too far for the tiger and the gingerbread man.

Failure: Also note the offending ponytail from earlier

Quietly content with our Jailbreak failure, with four nutri-grains still in hand, we left Harwich International Port with our heads held high.

Our attempt was probably one of the more uninspiring of all the Bristol Jailbreakers but we had a lot of fun and managed to take 1 car, 1 minibus, 2 coaches, 5 tubes, 7 trains, getting us nearly 300 miles and back to Bristol for free.

Our efforts have been deemed by ourselves and many others not really worthy of a Justgiving page; we’re more in the spare change in a bucket market.

Next year give it a go, you’ll raise some money, have a bit of an adventure and most likely be better at it than us!

Not everyone was as hopeless as Charlie and Oli. Check out the map below for a complete rundown of where everybody finished and congrats to Jailbait for making it the furthest to Venice, Italy!

Jailbait, Travel Bugs and Big Poppa came 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively