You know the next few hours are going to be interesting when you’re sitting on a coach at midnight
blindfolded! We got our t-shirts, signed the necessary medical forms, had our phones sealed up
so we couldn’t use them and put on our blindfolds for a two hour journey having no idea where
we were going. All we knew was it would be 100 miles away and we had to make it back as fast as
possible!

The coach my team was on got dropped in a tiny village called Cherry Burton, which we found out
a couple hours later is in Yorkshire, and as we all got off the coach it was guesswork as to what
direction to try. We started walking for a while, slowly breaking off from the other groups when we
came across some more villages, which all seemed smaller than the one we were originally dropped
off in. We knew at this point we weren’t doing very well! At about 5am we managed to find a road
to start our hitch-hiking attempt. After about two minutes of standing by the road a police car
stopped and decided to give us a lift as apparently we were headed to a dangerous area in which
we were likely to be offered drugs! They dropped us just outside Hull whilst giving is tips on how to
avoid train fares (i.e. hiding in the toilets!). We got to Hull train station to realise we had just missed
a 5.20am train to Sheffield, so attempted some more hitch-hiking which failed miserably before we
got the next train closer to 6.30am.

When we arrived in Sheffield, we started to have problems. The train and coach companies had
already let a few teams onto their transport for free and now they were stopping us from doing
this. We decided to give hitch-hiking another go, and after a couple hours and through a short
rain shower, we gave up. Our plan was to just sneak onto a train but after being threatened with a
criminal record from the transport police we decided we were beaten and had to buy a train ticket
back to Loughborough!

My team managed to make it back 17th out of around 50 teams which we were quite proud of,
however on returning to Loughborough I was more interested in a shower and some sleep! Lost was
an amazing experience and a really fun way to raise some money for charity. I think anyone who has
taken part in it would definitely recommend it as a brilliant and very unique RAG experience.

Fay Ryan