Dear Matt, I can’t believe that we are celebrating another birthday without you here to blow out your candles! Just because you are no longer here doesn’t mean that everyone has forgotten you – on the contrary you are still uppermost in our thoughts. The number of people who say to me what an effect […]
After their achievement of yesterday, the aches and pains of today must have been, whilst not unexpected, thoroughly demoralizing. At least they had the fabulous views to buoy them on their way down the final part of the mountain. The last part of today’s journal made me smile – I wonder if I ever found […]
I can’t begin to imagine the levels of exhaustion that the group must have felt during today’s trek, but the group photo at the summit certainly shows how happy they were to have completed their climb. I love that photo because to me it just encapsulates the pride that Matt felt of their achievement […]
I wonder if today was what the group had anticipated. When you go off on an adventure it must be quite hard to know exactly what to expect, and then when you get to where the good bits should be happening I guess sometimes they are not quite as exciting as you had thought that […]
One of the things I remember Matt telling us when he got back from the trip was how grateful he was to the porters for carrying all of their luggage up Mount Elgon. I have been told that climbing at altitude is a very different experience to ‘normal’ climbing, even for the fittest amongst us, […]
Matt used to tell me off for skipping breakfast – the most important meal of the day. I expect that today’s breakfast was a very tasty change to the normal bowl of porridge that they had been having. His normal breakfast of choice was either a large-sized bowl of Kellogs Cocoa Pops or a sausage […]
Well the group had finally got to the half-way point of their trip. The sense of achievement must have been running high as they embarked on the second leg of their adventure – the climbing of Mount Elgon in Uganda. Matt must have had a tinge of apprehension as the group passed through the border […]
The last day at Oronkai dawns, they had done so much whilst there and must have felt very accomplished. When you aren’t used to D.I.Y (as I expect most of these boys weren’t) it’s no mean feat to do what they did – walls painted, doors fixed, rubbish pits dug. Seeing the before and after […]
One of the things on Matt’s bucket list was to drink a pint of Guinness in Ireland, so when Peter and I went to Dublin earlier in the year we decided that we would do that on his behalf … Dublin – August 2017 Day 1 – August 25th After a short flight, […]
Matt was an in-patient at the Young Person’s Unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for over four months. During that time we got to know many of the staff very well, in fact many made us feel more like family whilst we were there. They were always prepared to spend time with us; […]