Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Caudet. I'm going to be

talking today to Bram Houghtonbus. He is somebody we've heard from already on the podcast because

he was one of the contenders in the very first Lupine racing trips. This is European equivalent,

I guess, of the BBC's Race Across the World,

where you have to get to a specified destination by train, by bus, by feet. You cannot fly.

Unlike race across the world, you are allowed to have a mobile phone and to do whatever is

necessary to get to your

destination. And it's always been very tense. And you might recall that on the first one,

Bram was beaten by about one minute to the finishing point in Istanbul. And that was just because

he got stopped going into Sultanama Square by security people. So most unfortunate then, but provisionally, Ram, you have actually won the latest challenge.

Can you tell me all about your trip?

This was, well, frankly, brutal.

It was brutal, yeah.

So just to set the scene for those who maybe are not initiated, the race involved

a trip from London to Tallinn with the first checkpoint in Brussels previously announced,

so you can book your Eurostar before you get going. But then you don't know anything about the

compulsory stops in between Brussels and Tallinn, of which various are offered, and you can basically compose your route among them.

There's some optionality there.

Obviously, I'm optimising for speed, not necessarily the sights and the sounds of the various places along the route.

This one was themed around brutalist architecture, so there were various places all over Europe that had a link to some

virtualist architecture. And you have to go to places, take a picture, check yourself in. So you

can prove you were there. And then you can move on to the next one. So there were a couple

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