A big chunk of fundraising success......

So OK, we havent been on the blog for a while......strangely enough the year seems to be flying by which is a bit worrying to be honest as every month that passes the challenge is getter ever closer!! 

The weather in Durham has been very wet, raining overcast muddy and generally glum on the whole bike training front!  So I put my efforts into the fundraising Medium evening on the 14th of June, its strange how much effort it actually takes to organise and event of a charity nature as most of the time you are beg, stealing and borrowing to keep the costs as low as possible!!  I wrote letters, e-mails and actually turned up at various places asking for donations of raffle prizes, some kind friends also helped by selling tickets and helping with raffle donations too. 

I advertised the event with posters, facebook events and the This is Durham tourist webpage but I never actually got 1 phonecall or e-mail, I seriously underestimated how hard it is to actually sell the tickets!  After weeks of networking and getting the word out things did start to pick up and although I was let down on the night there was approximately 55 people turned up out of an expected 96!  Actually on the night I was running around like a panicked headless chicken and when the moment came to stand on stage, I was a seriously shocked panicked headless chicken, I have never ever felt like that before in my life, I just wanted to curl up in a ball and hide!!!  I stood in front of hundreds of people at my mums funeral and that didnt bother me, but standing on stage with a microphone in hand in front of fifty people.........not my idea of fun!  I somehow managed to get a fumble of words out and make it up as I went along, Dave was fantastic, the raffle was a huge success with an array of prizes, the cake sale which I had put my heart and soul into was a success to with my cookie monsters being the favourite!  Helen came with Dave and did private readings and tarot, and in the middle of the night another medium successfully filled my interval for me (completely unplanned but a fab suprise) meaning I didnt have to be on stage longer than neccerssary and adding to the entertainment of the evening! 

The overall event raised a mahooooooooosive £802.60 towards my fundraising goal, I banked it and sent off the cheque to Action for Charity and added the total to my justgiving page which now reports a huge 68% of my target achieved, I am over half way :-)

The morning after, Jean and I made our way down to Durham and found a fabulous little coffee shop near the cathedral (coffee was needed!) and Jean kindly treated me to a baguette and 2 Americanos, I am posh you know! (I had never had one before lol)  then we threw in a cheeky one hour bike ride before collecting the kids from school......amazingly although it had rained all morning and all afternoon, evning and night we managed to pick the cheeky hour which it didnt to fit our ride in, lucky.....or fate :-)  who knows, all made for a fab couple of days :-) and I am glad the bulk of the fundraising is all over for now!

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported and helped me :-)