Andy’s 26th Run – April 2026

Run 26 was initially delayed due to an unexpected hospitalisation for Andy!

After a fairly uneventful journey to the border, it was time to once again play border bingo!

Early optimism though was somewhat misplaced!

In the end, 7 hours 33 minutes! And once we were finally underway, it didn’t take long for Tony to acquire a speeding ticket! 🙂

With huge thanks once again to Valentya Skoromets, we headed to our first overnight hotel in Vinnitsya where we were able to leave some packages for her o be collected by her daughter.

The following day, we started the relatively short trip down to Odesa:

Our partner in Odesa, “I Will Help”, recently celebrated 5 years of supporting refugees and soldiers and issued thank you certificates for 2 of our UK partners, Age UK and Medi Tech Trust.

Back in our apartment, it was a very noisy night here – around 14 drones at 0130am and a second wave at 0500. Target was the Port itself, approx 1 mile from our apartment. This video is from the first wave.
Drone attack on Odesa 22 April 2026

Bearing in mind my health issue, I thought it would be interesting to check my heart rate during this episode! Surprisingly, it was the lowest it has been for some time so this sort of thing doesn’t stress me at all!

After a couple of days of downtime, we headed up to meet our other key partner, Anton and “Help from the Heart”, up in Kropyvnytskyi where we passed over a number of items for delivery to front line locations.

We once again visited the Orphanage with specialist wheelchairs and Nappies. We also handed over 30000uah on behalf of Hastings Masons to help complete the installation of improved heating. This money will be used to purchase and install the pipework needed for these radiators that were donated by a Nordic charity:

We had a very quick return border crossing and a great run down to Dunkirk and the run came to an end.