The Concept

On the 14^th of April 2010 David J Coughlan posted this on his Facebook wall:

“I could really do with an adventure. I've had enough of this, time for mountains, endless fields and some bloke with a sword guarding a bridge. But CE 4010 stands in my way, bloody typical.”

Initially this made me yearn for simpler times. While in school Dave, Cian and I had set out for Venice with a chess board and very little money. In the years following we travelled to Prague, London and the Middle East. Since then the economy has collapsed and we’ve become far more settled, with Dave in final year Civil Engineering, Cian doing a Masters in Development in Brighton and myself settled down doing a Masters with a long term girlfriend in London.

With Vic working and money tight, I couldn’t justify spending anything running off travelling with school friends. This is when a thought struck me… I asked myself the question as to what turns a ‘trip’ into an ‘adventure’. Adversity.

What if we were to go for a pint with a friend in a far off city, while spending no money to get there? That injected adversity, turning a trip into an adventure, and alleviated any guilt as the whole point was that no money be spent!

We chose to go to Zurich as it’s roughly the right distance away, none of us have ever been there, and the trip there fulfills two out of three of the criteria set out by Dave: “mountains, endless fields and some bloke with a sword guarding a bridge”. You never know, we might fulfill the third!

So here are the two simple rules:

1. No money at all to be spent on the trip. This includes for food, accommodation or transport

2. Little or no money to be spent in preparation for the trip with all we need ideally being recycled or donated

The exception to these is that we will almost certainly going to have to spend a little on a) getting across the channel and b) flying home from Zurich.

The purpose of this blog is to keep people informed of our plans and preparations to generate ideas as to how to save money and to encourage people to donate or loan us the materials that we’d need.

Ross