The 2016 #CoastalConvoy Rally Route

Just two more sleeps… until the 2016 Pink Car Rally, a #CoastalConvoy travelling from Southend-on-Sea to Hunstanton.  I was delighted to have been interviewed this week by NorthNorfolkRadio.  I’m hoping that the interview will find some more Pink Car owners who might like to join the rally.  This is where we will be… and when…

10th & 11th September

The route and where to find us – although we’ll be hard to miss!
Please note, due to the number of miles we will be travelling, all times are approximate, but we will aim to keep everyone informed of our progress via our Pink Car Rally Facebook page & our Twitter accounts @pinkcarrally and @saligray so please ‘follow’ to catch our tweets.

Saturday 10th September – Leg 1

Southend-on-Sea to Lowestoft

9/9.30am       Arrive Southend on Sea – City Beach, Marine Parade, SS1 2EJ (approx. postcode)
10.30am         Depart Southend on the A127/A12
11.45/12noon Arrive Colchester – B&Q carpark, Lightship Way, CO2 8FR
1pm                 Depart Colchester on the A12/A1214
1.45/2pm        Arrive Ipswich – Treehouse Children’s Hospice IP3 8NS
3pm                 Depart Ipswich on the A1214/A12
4.30/4.45pm   Arrive Lowestoft – ASDA Superstore carpark, off Horn Hill, NR33 0PX
5.30pm            End of day 1 of the rally

Overnight stay and Pinkie Dinner in Lowestoft

Sunday 11th September – Leg 2

Great Yarmouth to Hunstanton

9/9.30am         Arrive Great Yarmouth – Tesco Southtown NR31 0DW
10.30am           Depart Great Yarmouth on the A149
11.45/12noon  Arrive Cromer – Tesco Sherinham NR26 8RY
1pm                  Leave Cromer on the A149
2.30/2.45pm   Arrive Hunstanton – Tesco Superstore, Southend Road, PE36 5AR
3.30pm             End of day 2 of the rally

Raising awareness of, and funds for, the Little Princess Trust charity.
Raising funds for ‘real hair’ wigs for children and young adults.
Find us on Facebook  More information can be found on our website

 

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

#CoastalConvoy East Anglia 10/11th September 2016

A week today, the Pink Car Rally will be in East Anglia raising awareness of, and funds for, the Little Princess Trust. The 9th annual rally will leave Southend-on-Sea at 10.30am on Saturday 10th September and head for Colchester, where the B&Q Store has kindly offered its car-park for a pit-stop. We should arrive around 11.45/12noon and we’ll be there until 1pm, when we’ll be heading off to the Treehouse Hospice in Ipswich, for a private visit. The Little Princess Trust gives ‘real-hair’ wigs to children and young adults who lose their own hair, primarily through chemotherapy, so each year we visit a children’s hospital or hospice, so that poorly children can enjoy our pink cars. Sometimes during these visits we meet children who have received (or are about to receive) wigs from the charity, which is particularly poignant. The rally will leave the hospice at 3pm and head to the Asda Superstore in Lowestoft, another lovely store which is supporting the rally by allowing us to use their car-park to end ‘Day 1’ of the two-day event. We should arrive at around 4.30/4.45pm and we will remain there until approx. 5.30pm when we will head off for a ‘Pinkie Dinner’ before retiring to a local hotel for the night.

Day 2 of this year’s Pink Car Rally will start from Tesco Great Yarmouth, a super-friendly store where the Community Champion, Hayley, has not only made us feel very welcome to start the rally from their car-park, but has also been actively promoting our forthcoming visit! What a star – thank you Hayley! The pink cars will arrive at Tesco between 9am and 9.30am in preparation for a 10.30am start. From Great Yarmouth, the rally will head to Cromer before a pit-stop at Tesco Sheringham from 12noon until 1pm, when they will make their way to Hunstanton – the final destination for the 2016 Pink Car Rally – arriving around 2.30/2.45pm. We are still waiting to see who will accommodate our cars in Hunstanton for our final rally stop, but if you want to see us whilst we are there, we will be posting updates on our Pink Car Rally Facebook page and Twitter account, so do follow us on social media to avoid disappointment. We will also try to advise you of any delays along the way, so please read the ‘Posts by others’ on our Facebook page too. If you see us along the route, please give us a wave, flash your lights and toot your horn! If you manage to take any photos, and you share them on social media, do share them with us too – we would love to see them.

If you’re reading this blog post and you have (or someone you know has) a pink car, it’s not too late to join the rally. Please email pinkcarrally@me.com for more details. You are welcome to join part of the rally, or the whole rally, as long as your car paintwork is 80% pink.

Ways to support the Pink Car Rally:-
To make a donation, please head to our JustGiving Team page and select one of the Team Members to donate to their page.
To help us to find more Pink Cars to join the rally, please share this blog post.
To help us to raise awareness of the Rally & the Little Princess Trust, please like and share our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter and RT our Tweets.
If you work (or know anyone who works) in the media, please ask them to cover the Pink Car Rally.

Thank you…
Sali x

Read Full Post »

I’m looking for a Pink Car, for the 1st Prize in our Special Pink Raffle – please can you help me to find one?

I’m busy planning the 2014 Pink Car Rally Fundraising Campaign and I have decided that we need a Pink Car, as 1st  prize in our Special Pink Raffle.  Now, I realise it’s a BIG ASK, but my glass is ALWAYS half-full…. so all I have to do now, is to find a company which has a kind heart, values what we are trying to achieve, loves the work of the Little Princess Trust Charity.. and ‘hey presto’ –  decides to present us with a Pink Car to raffle!

Now… let me just turn my hat around and look at it from the other perspective. Being both a volunteer and a business coach enables me to look at a situation from both sides.  The first consideration to any commercial company is the ‘what’s in it for me?’ factor. Sadly, the simple fact that they are helping a charity doesn’t cut the muster! I understand that. I also realise that most commercial companies seem to prefer to donate to the ‘huge’ charities… which of course gives them good press coverage, recognition and appreciation from the public, to name but a few ‘benefits’.  

However, I would argue the case for a small charity, where such a donation could make an incredible impact – the benefits to the donor company could be greater than they could possibly imagine.  For example, I use every possible minute of my spare time to promote the Pink Car Rally, and any business which ‘helps and supports’ us is thanked very publicly.  The best illustration of this is the story of the Pink National Express Coach:-

In 2009 I entered National Express’s ‘Bling My Coach’ competition, whereby people were invited to design a livery for one of their coaches and say where they would take the coach, if they won the competition.  I was one of 5 finalists, whose designs went to public vote.  My design was pink and incorporated the Little Princess Trust Charity’s logo, together with the Pink Car Rally website address. The public voted and soon the two front-runners were Action for Children and the Pink Car Rally and believe me, we were ‘neck and neck’.  It was incredibly stressful!  Now, if you look at the Action for Children website, you can see that even in 2009 their annual report mentioned 12,000+ volunteers and supporters (huge voting potential) and ‘millions of pounds’ raised through fundraising.  The Little Princess Trust, at this time, might just have recruited its first paid staff member!  And the volunteers could probably be counted on 4 hands! Fearsome competition and yet we won! So how on earth did we do it? Sheer determination and the power of social networking! The coach was duly wrapped pink and joined the 2010 Pink Car Rally, carrying pink passengers.  It became part of the main National Express fleet, owned by their franchisee Yeomans Travel, Hereford, and could regularly be seen on the Hereford, Gloucester, Cheltenham, London route and in fact, was only recently ‘unwrapped’.  National Express and Yeomans Travel kindly continued to support the rally for another two years, by entering the pink coach in the 2011 rally and in two legs of The Big One – the 2012 End2End rally.

The coach became a much-photographed, travelling advertisement for both the charity and the rally.  Needless to say, we were incredibly grateful to National Express and thanked them publicly, many times.  In addition, we mentioned the National Express Pink Coach in every press release, during every radio interview, on our Facebook page, on Twitter, on Linked-in, whilst giving our ‘charity talks’, during networking events….. at any and every conceivable opportunity.  In 2011, the Head of Media for National Express told me that their stats showed that we had generated an unsurpassed level of publicity for them.

So…. I’m looking for a Pink Car, for the 1st Prize in our Special Pink Raffle.  Please can you help me to find one?  And if anyone should ask you “what’s in it for us” you will be able to tell them “more than you could possibly imagine.”

Read Full Post »

We did it!!!

Struggling to hold our banner, in the high wind and heavy rain. Yes, it’s mid-August!

Well, we’re nearly at the end of February 2013 and I still haven’t managed to update my Blog! I had such great plans, prior to last year’s epic rally! I had upgraded my Nokia to an iPhone and invested in an iPad, to ensure I could write a daily Blog, updating our followers of our progress. In the event, both failed L or more to the point, I failed! I couldn’t connect to the internet, I locked myself out of Facebook and when I tried to re-connect, I was banned for some ridiculous amount of time, because I was trying to reconnect through equipment I hadn’t connected with before…. I could continue, but suffice to say I had to undergo a steep learning curve, whilst the other delightful Pinkies filled in the gaps for me!

So – huge apologies to everyone for the lack of communication.  Hopefully you all managed to keep abreast of things through Social Media?  Miranda from The Sunny Times http://www.thesunnytimes.co.uk/?s=pink+car+rally was an absolute God-send and made huge efforts to contact us along the way and then report on our progress.  Twitter was awash with sightings, although I don’t think we quite managed to ‘trend’.

The Rally was the most incredible journey – from the moment we left, in heavy rain, gale-force winds and (at the last minute) hail, having discovered that the A9 was closed and having to follow the satnav over the mountainous Highlands, to the moment we arrived in Land’s End, six days later, in glorious sunshine.  There are so many stories to tell – far too many for a Blog – but I have started writing them down and hope to produce them in some form or another, in due course.

I would like to thank everyone who supported the Pink Car Rally and the Special Pink Raffle, for your kindness and your generosity.  Together we raised an incredible £16, 067.06, which will fund 45 children’s wigs.

I will leave you with one story, which could perhaps be better described as a cautionary tale.  Having been diverted off the A9 onto a single-track mountain road with ‘passing places’, I wasn’t too concerned, until my SatNav instructed me to “Turn Right”.  Have you ever had one of those moments when every inch of your body is telling you NOT to do something…. and yet…. I didn’t know the road at all and the SatNav became pretty insistent…. so I obeyed and turned right. Well, the mountain road with ‘passing places’ may have been WITHIN my comfort zone, but I quickly realised that the track I had turned onto, which incidentally had LONG grass growing along the centre of it, was well OUTSIDE my comfort zone, especially as it was no wider than my car, showed no sign of passing places and was heading steeply upwards, into thick fog! However, a glance in my rear-view mirror affirmed that there was a complete convoy of pink vehicles behind me and NO place to turn round. I started to ‘glow’ (well, I am a woman!) when I looked at the unmade road ahead, complete with massive potholes and I wondered just how ‘low’ the suspension of the Pink Porsche was…. and whether the Smart would enjoy climbing the very steep mountain track….. I turned to my 15 year old navigator.

“Lissy” I hissed, “How many miles does the SatNav say we will be on this track for?”

“26”

And with that, the SatNav lost signal.  In fact, all method of communication was lost – there was no mobile phone signal and the fog was so dense that I could really only see the car behind me, and very little in front of me! I knew there was a sheer drop, to my left and there was no precise edge to the track! It was the longest 26 miles I have EVER driven and it delayed us by 2 hours.  I clearly remember arriving for coffee at Dornoch, two hours later than anticipated, and thinking “This is only the beginning of our six-day journey”.

Read Full Post »