At university I drove a minibus taking the fencing team around the country to what turned out to be many of our best victories. One particular trip stand out: Leeds. This immense city has a series of one way roads that are cunningly positioned to offer drivers the opportunity to get from one end of the city to the other without going through the centre.
We left Lancaster at 11 o'clock, leaving plenty of time for our 2 o'clock match; the road down was pretty straight forward, motorway down to Manchester then a second leg to Leeds. Done. No! We knew where the campus was but the one way system took us to the other side of town. Our natural flair got us even more lost until we decided to make the ultimate humiliation for any male driver by asking for directions. 'oh dear' the directions weren't good so far, 'you're miles away, go up that road to the car park and a traffic warden will help you'. Great, we left the big road and I ended up driving a large vehicle through the small streets of an unknown city.
One good thing was that the directionless man was right about the traffic warden in the car park, who was so nice he gave us a map! 10 minutes later we arrived at the gates to the campus, about half an hour late for the match, no worries though, we had some very fast fencers with us and could still grab victory on a good day. This day however was not a good day. The university was experiencing what we should have been dreading the most... an open day. What seemed to be hundreds of millions of people were flocking at the gates and the campus parking was reserved for those young ignorant teenagers. We were given directions to another car park which we promptly set off for. We arrived at a large empty field labeled 'car park', success! No, this was reserved for the open day. We were given more directions and yet again we came to dead ends. We considered just leaving the bus on the side of the road but these spaces were reserved for permit holders only.
Finally we arrived back at the front gate, I pleaded a great plea and ended up handing over a crisp 5 pound note, the guard in his bright yellow jacket acted like he couldn't see us go through and we finally made it to the car park. We ran as fast as possible but it was no use, we scored some good points and lost by a small margin. Later we found out their best players were either ill or in exams, so we left disheartened. Victory could have easily been ours against one of the strongest teams in the league.
We got back at 7pm, I had done a little over 6 hours solid driving. On the positive side, we maintained our place in the league table, coming second behind mighty Manchester. We got through to the Trophy play-offs and ended up semi-finalists, loosing to Loughborough who went on to win a promotion.
