Adventures of Snail

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The original snail logo adorning the walls of the Physics lab in Bath, England.


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Meet the Wildashes

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Matt and Paula Wildash are giving up their vacation time to drive around England in a rental van (named Snail 1) big enough to hold 6 people, 2 bike cases, luggage and enough Walker’s Crisps to start another potato famine.  Matt and his brother Nick lived next door to our grandparents growing up. Nick is roughly the same age as our eldest brother Simon and Matt is the same age as Daniel. For me, I had a stuffed panda named Kevin. My lack of a human, similarly aged counterpart living next door left me with the choice of Leia or Chewbacca when we were role-playing Star Wars. It also contributed our routine hide and seek games  - where everyone else would piss off home while I hid under a tree for 3 hours - crying. Ah, memories. That being said, I once fell into a mass of stinging nettles and Matt was very helpful and consoling. Daniel not so much.    We have known the Wildashes almost as long as we’ve known our own family and over the years they have ...
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The last day was the toughest by far. We set off from Truro in the morning in chilly weather and heavy winds. We had cut down the miles due to timing and exhaustion. We also wanted to avoid major roads. We had a plan to meet for lunch around 1pm. We immediately encountered a path that was narrow, covered in mud and loose stones and overgrown with bushes. There was no way we would be able to cycle on it so we walked our bikes for miles. Many, many miles. On the plus side, we witnessed some of the most spectacular views of our entire trip, at one point walking down a mine trail with an old mine shaft on either side of us. Slowly. We were averaging 4 miles an hour. Twenty miles of what should have been cycling took us four hours. That's two laps around White Rock Lake and that takes us an hour and 15 minutes. Once we were off the muddy paths were had to climb hills all afternoon and because of the weather conditions we couldn't go downhill very fast. At the bottom of o...
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