21st June RI Convention at Birmingham

On Sunday 21st June, the solstice, we were at the RI Convention in the NEC at Birmingham to visit the House of Friendship and to do a four hour stint as Host Organising Committee Ambassadors.

The first picture is the RIBI stand in the HoF, where we had intended to offer our services to help with the manning but it turned out that we were not needed, so we went about getting some bits and pieces from the trade stalls, met up with lots of old friends and had lunch

After lunch we presented ourselves to the Ambassador's coordinator, who gave us orange sashes and hats, and we were given the task of standing just outside the entrance to tha HoF at the bottom of some stairs to give general advice but specifically to get people to the buses to take them to the evening event at Warwick Castle. There are 19,500 at the Convention and 6,000 of these were going to be crammed into Warwick Castle for a medieval evening. This was a great opportunity to meet new Rotarians from all over the world and also to meet up with people we had spent some time with in San Diego. At 1800hrs we had finished and were tired so we drove home stopping for a meal at Newport. A really great day and although the full Convention was just too expensive for us we thoroughly enjoyed this experience of dipping our toes into a Convention for a day.