A friend called me up and asked if I fancied a look to Holy Island with him though, and as I had nothing better on I thought it would be worth going even if just for the craic.

Took a few pics on the day, but this is the only one I’m really happy with.

Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island, Northumberland

~Shepy

On the 1st of March Paul will leave his home in Newcastle and head out into the wild blue yonder, starting from Newcastle Central station as his blog for the event indicates. Paul will then continue on around the globe, with a hopeful destination of the opposite side of the world in New Zealand, but will restrict himself to offers of accommodation and travel from those kind people on twitter who are following him.

If you want to help out, there are a few ways you can do that:

• Follow him on twitter via @twitchhiker
• Visit twitchhiker.com and learn a bit more about it
• Go and digg the story to help raise awareness.
• Go and upmod it on reddit too.
• Go to the donate page and give anything you can.
• Add a post to your blog to get the word our there if possible.
• …and if you can, offer Paul a bed or travel if you can via twitter :)

~Shepy

Thankfully this year all of the cars that went out came back in the same condition as they went out in which we were all happy about, especially Martyn. He has had the misfortune of crashing on the ring in the last two years we have been out there. The hotel where we stayed is the Ringhaus, which has the hotel rooms named after corners on the circuit rather than being numbered. In 2006 Martyn was in the Hohe-Acht room and managed to crash on Hohe-Acht on his second lap out around the ring. Last year he was staying in Brünnchen and managed to crash on that corner as well. It had become a bit of a running joke that we were either going to make him stay in a tent, or ask Frank the hotelier to make sure his room was an easy corner or a straight. Thankfully there was no crash at all this year from our group, though there were plenty on the ring during the time we were there, partially because of the number of cars on the track for the BF Goodrich race on the Saturday and partially because of the wet conditions on some of the other days the general public were out on the track.

There were still a few strange goings on while we were out there, such as the decision not to go back to the Ringhaus again next year after a meal we ordered one night took nearly an hour to arrive and wasn’t even what we asked for. Also finding that the linen closet was wide open with a board with all the room keys hanging on it unattended means we will be looking for new accommodation for next year’s trip.

Also in the hotel at the same time as us was a bunch of other U.K. guys who were Audi fanatics, and as Glenn and I rounded one of the corners we spotted one of their cars pulled over at the side of the track with a guy projectile vomiting over the barrier. Thankfully I had camera in hand and managed to grab a quick snap or two of it for mockery purposes back in the hotel later on.


We went for a meal in the Pistenklause another of the nights and poor Martyn (Does this guy have no luck?) went to get a fork full of salad only to notice his lettuce was moving. When he moved it aside he found a slug wandering about on the plate! Now granted the place was extremely busy, and they had gone out of their way to fit us in at zero notice, but you would still expect the salad to be washed before being served to you. We did get our drinks free out of it, but I think we will be thinking twice before going along there again.

I also managed to fit in a cheeky explore while I was out there, finding an abandoned hotel next to the roadside while we were driving along. I’m going to be doing an explore catch up soon, as I have about 10 sites I have yet to process the pictures for or make reports on the various Urbex forums, so I will cover the hotel when I get to those.

As a final bit geekery while I was out there I switched on the N95 Sports Tracker while I was going round for a lap and GPS logged the entire circuit, so I have a nice little GPS map identical to any map of the circuit you might have seen.

A couple of sample pictures from the week are below, followed by a link to the gallery with all of the images.

And the rest of the gallery can be found here.

~Shepy