I committed major muppetry today, I mean major complete uber-muppetry!
But first the context: On returning to Church House after the ordination on Friday there was a message from Phil Rankin asking a BIT of a favour. He was going to struggle to get to England on Monday to present a thing on 'Spirituality and Young people' at the Listen to the Voice conference at Centre Parcs. So, as I was going anyway, could I cover it instead? At this point I made my first mistake, I said "Yes!"
Now this was a bit of an error as I was busy all day Saturday and all day Sunday. So at 9pm on Sunday I wrestled all the offspring into bed and sat down to prepare a seminar on current research into the Spirituality of young people.
At midnight I crawled into bed with the cunning plan of setting off early and having a bonus two hours at Centre Parcs to fine tune the Powerpoint and the patter. So up at 06:00 out the door by 07:00 I was. Now my head had been so full of seminar that some of the smaller organizational details had passed me by without realising!
Thus it was that on the stroke of 11am, 160 miles later I arrived at Centre Parcs, Elveden Forest (Yay) on to be told that they had never heard of the "Listen to the Voice" Conference. A bit of head scratching later and they found out why, I was supposed to be at Centre Parcs, Sherwood Forest 110 miles from where I now was, (and where I could have already been at IF I'd been aiming for it), DOH!
So an extra 2.5 hours driving, no prep time left BUT I made it and the seminar went OK!
(and as an added bonus, it has given lots of people a laugh!)
Almost beaten by the Toyota lady who flew to Frankfurt, got in a taxi asked to go to Cologne and only 3 hours and 200 euros later realised she had flown to the wrong airport.
But you do win today's prize.
Watch Clockwise for punishment
Ian that makes me feel so much better, I forgot to book our church centre for our Youth Meeting, we ended up at the back of the church! But it went o.k.
Oouch - reminds of the time in the late 1980's when American Christian youth work became all the rage - a certain youth worker of that era with a reputation for blagging proudly announced he had got a freebie trip to an American summer school at Washinton State University. He went on and on so much that several of us kept quiet and watch him fly to Washington DC and arrive at Washington University. Travel from the east coast of the USA to the west coast cost him a fortune and he missed two days at either end of the conference.
Tom,
Thanks for that. The wrong side of America makes my navigational error seem incosequential :-)
Aw bless you! You didn' ask Agent K for directions did you?
Have you read the Dirk Gently novels by Douglas Adams? Your little diversion reminded me...
Dirk firmly belileves in the interconnectedness of all things and that when driving wherever he sets out to go to, he always looks for a car driven in a positive manner and follows it. Whilst he rarely ends up where he set out to be he invariably finds himself where he needs to be.
A useful allegory, I find, my life rarely leads me to where I think I should be....
Yep, Dirk Gently is FAB. I love the car idea .... my other fav' bit is the battle over cleaning out the fridge. Genius!