By Lottie Hopkinson-Woolley

The team spent last weekend at Miriam’s house in Yorkshire making and vacuum packing food. Jess and Lottie drove up late on Friday night after work in Jess’ trusty van, ‘Gethin’, arriving around midnight with all of Velocity’s loose equipment and some very tasty snacks kindly provided by Love Corn and New Forest Fruits.

The alarms went off at 8am on Saturday, and it was all systems go. We spent the day preparing breakfasts and trail mixes at the Turkey Farm—a huge thanks to Alison and Christopher (Mims’ parents) for letting us use the farm and their massive vacuum-packing machine!

Around 6pm we finished the breakfasts and moved on to the trail mixes, which took less time since they involved fewer ingredients. We had not sat down or taken a proper break all day, apart from the occasional quick loo stop, our backs were starting to feel the strain! Thankfully we did not go hungry, Mims had done a snack run the night before, we had a smorgasbord of: carrots, hummus, grapes, babybells and of course a Terry’s choccy orange. We called it a day at 8pm, headed back to the house for pizza and a well-earned G&T and even enjoyed a dip in the hot tub before an early night!

The next day, we were treated to blueberry pancakes with bacon and maple syrup, courtesy of Alison. Afterwards, we returned to the Turkey Farm to finish off the trail mixes. Lottie handled the ingredients, Mims vac-packed and Jess unloaded the van full of Velocity’s loose equipment. Jess also organised everything into crates, categorising the items so we can easily find them when we return for our pre-shipping inspection in a few weeks. We took to round two of the banana chips not liking the vacuum packing, so we had to re-bag the banana trail mixes too.

Around mid-afternoon Jess and Lottie headed back down the M1, leaving Mims to finish vacuum-packing the last of the trail mixes. In total, we made 600 breakfast meals and made a good dent on the trail mixes—a job well done!