iStockphoto / TraceyAPhotos
Have you ever set your mind to something so foolish that the mission itself became the entertainment? Those are the best side quests in life. The adventures you absolutely don’t need to take but you’ve set your mind to it and you’re damn sure to see it through to the end.
My version of this was tracking down and cooking turkey eggs. The eggs from a turkey, not eggs from the country Turkey. It legitimately took me a full decade to find someone selling turkey eggs and I went to countless farmer’s markets along the way. I purchased multiple ostrich eggs and cooked frittatas. I began to convince myself there was a grand conspiracy surrounding turkey eggs and the farmers are hoarding all the ultra-decadent eggs for themselves and honestly, I was mostly correct.
Turkeys lay fewer eggs than chickens so farmers tend to keep them. Turkey eggs also make one hell of an eggs benedict which was the first thing I cooked after FINALLY finding a farmer to sell me a dozen turkey eggs back in February of this year, a decade after I read an article with an excerpt about how NYC steakhouses used to serve them back in the 1800s. I finished my mission, they were delicious, and I respect this Mad Lad who spent six years trying to park in every parking space at his favorite grocery store in England.
The guy published his adventure in a Twitter thread complete with a screenshot of the spreadsheet he kept, a map of the best and worst parking spots, and his strategy for parking in every single spot. Here’s his threat that’s since gone viral on Twitter:
For the last six years I’ve kept a spreadsheet listing every parking spot I’ve used at the local supermarket in a bid to park in them all. This week I completed my Magnum Opus! A thread.
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
I live in Bromley and almost always shop at the same Sainsbury’s in the centre of town, here’s a satellite view of their car park. It’s a great car park because you can always get a space and it is laid out really well. Comfortably in my top 5 Bromley car parks. pic.twitter.com/Q1CwLdFqJ3
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
After quite a few years of going each week I started thinking about how many of the different spots I’d parked in and how long it would take to park in them all. My life is one long roller coaster.
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
Rather than walking around the car park counting each space and exposing myself as a lunatic, I used the overhead view to mark out a vector image to make it easier to identify each space.
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
I don’t own a motorcycle and I’m not disabled but I do have children so I can legitimately use the family spaces. This means that in the car park there are 211 parking spaces that I needed to conquer.
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
I do a big shop once a week with the occasional additional trip to pick up extras but a conservative figure of 60 visits a year meant that I could in theory have completed my challenge in under four years. Annoyingly a global pandemic slowed me down.
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
To make it easy for me to identify which space I was parking in I assigned each ‘block’ a letter and within each block, bay numbers which I would make note of on my phone and then add it all to my super awesome spreadsheet. pic.twitter.com/y785tdxhhw
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
The spreadsheet has been given a bit of extra razzle dazzle to spruce it up a bit for presentation but this is it, this is 6 years of monotony. pic.twitter.com/kjCpMXeKo6
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
For anyone keen on taking a pilgrimage to the Bromley Sainsbury’s car park to bathe in my glory I’ve also marked out the best and worst spots to park because I’m such a swell guy. Seriously though, avoid the spaces next to the trolley bays, they’re just terrible. pic.twitter.com/M5gNBRJwja
— Gareth Wild (@GarethWild) April 27, 2021
The mad lad did it. It took him six long years of shopping at the same grocery store in Bromley, a city on the Southeast outskirts of London. But he did it.
He set a goal and accomplished it. It didn’t matter to him how foolish the endeavor was. He put forth a plan and saw it to fruition. Now, based on some recent tweets it sounds like he was a guest on a radio show to discuss his parking shenanigans.
This kind of has me wondering what the next exotic egg I can track down is to replace my hunt for turkey eggs.