Team Honk is coming to St Albans

I’ve been planning to write this post for over a month now. I’ve been wanting to tell you all about our exciting plans for the bloggers of St Albans to do their bit towards raising money for Sport Relief. But, to be totally honest with you I’ve been so busy wrapped up in organising it all that I’ve just not had time. There are only 36 hours left now before it’s our turn on the Team Honk stage, so without further ado I guess I’d better tell you what we’re up to.

It’s nearly a year to the day since I told you all about Team Honk – the amazing team of three bloggers that formed to raise money for Comic Relief. After raising an amazing £10,000 last year – this year they’ve reformed to aim to beat that for Sport Relief. This year they’re coordinating the Team Honk Relay – an attempt to take a baton from Lands End to John O Groats involving as many bloggers as possible from across the country.

It may not be the most direct route (and that may be an understatement!) but it seems that the country’s bloggers strangely aren’t lined up nicely in a straight line between the start and finish points!

Map image “borrowed” from the Team Honk website

The plan is for us to use as many different modes of transport for the baton as possible and from the pictures I’ve seen so far that is definietly happening!

So what are you doing in St Albans I hear you impatiently ask.

Well on the morning of Tuesday 4 February the baton will start it’s journey in the centre of Hemel Hempstead. After calling in to Radio Decorum Paul from I’m Well Confused will be leading a crack team of cyclists towards St Albans. By just after 11am the baton should hopefully arrive at Mandeville school where it will be greeted by the Mayor of St Albans, Councillor Annie Brewster.

Jenny from Cheetahs in my Shoes has been working closely with the school to help them organise a human chain that will take the baton from there to St Peters school. Mandeville’s Year 6 pupils have done the maths to work out exactly how many people are required for the human chain and when they worked out they didn’t quite have enough they very ably presented their business case to the head of St Peters to ask her to allow her children to meet them part way. Luckily for Sport Relief it seems that Year 6 includes some very persuasive pupils!

From St Peters Annie QPR will help the Mayor get to grips with a Micro Scooter and they will lead the next part of the relay towards Cuthberts Toys in the city centre. Cuthberts have very kindly provided one of our team with a scooter for her part of the leg and afterwards we’ll be auctioning it off in aid of Sport Relief. Thank you Cuthberts.

Our final call with the Mayor will be a visit to the offices of local paper the Herts Advertiser. We figured that if we wanted publicity then the paper would have to come up with a pretty good excuse to ignore us if we actually went to them for the photo call!

After bidding farewell to the Mayor, Helen from Actually Mummy will scoot the baton out to DJs Jungle, from where Kirsty from Damson Lane and I will collect it and take it to St Albans City Station. We’ll both be pushing buggies and Little Miss C plans to scoot as far as she can for our leg.

Once we reach the station we’ll pass the baton over to Steph from Steph’s Two Girls who, with her two girls, will take the baton on the train towards London for our handover to Team Honk London.

There are rumours of fancy dress. Rumours of a Zippy costume. Rumours of red wigs. And definite news of lots of fun. We’ll be pretty hard to miss, so if you’re in St Albans on Tuesday then please do keep an eye out for us and cheer us on. We don’t have the relevant licences for a collection bucket but if you want to sponsor us then you can do so online here, or if you text HONK to 70005 you can donate £5 to Sport Relief. Please do support us – St Albans Team Honk needs you!

If you’re not in St Albans then you can follow our progress on social media where we’ll be using the hashtag #teamhonkrelay.

The first ever Sainsbury’s Sport Relief Games take place from Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd March 2014. The public can join the fun and games by running, swimming or cycling their way to raising cash at over a thousand venues around the country, including the landmark events at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

As one of the biggest fundraising events, Sport Relief brings the entire nation together to get active raise cash and change lives. The money raised by the public is spent by Comic Relief to help transform the lives of some of the poorest and most disadvantaged people both at home in the UK and across the world.