The Hopkinson lab was half-drowned in bubblewrap last week as the team put in a gargantuan effort to pack like they had never packed before. No cramming of coathangers into a plastic bag or unfolded clothes piled haphazardly into a rucksack – no, this was the real deal.

As Australia is the continental equivalent of a Class 5 clean room, anything entering the country is subject to extremely stringent regulations. Coupled with the fact that our kit was to be transported on a huge container ship, this led to three very simple rules:

1. All items must be salt-water protected where necessary

2. All items must be wood-free

3. All items must be dust-free

Now, for the 99.9% of you who have never tried to remove all the wood and dust from an electric sander, these regulations may seem quite reasonable. After all, it would be a terrible thing if a British speck of dust were to work its way into the pure untouched land Down Under (although one might therefore question why exactly their country is so eager to hang on to a certain other little trophy that also contains what is essentially dust. *GLOAT*) However, not wanting to cause more problems, the packers worked hard into the night (in fact, right through it) with vacuum cleaner and by the morning, the tiredness was clearly beginning to show when Laura vacuumed some Dremel bits so very thoroughly that the entire lot disappeared up the tube. This was promptly followed by an originally-slightly-dusty-and-afterwards-extremely-dusty binbag which, to our knowledge, is still in there.

The team also enjoyed their last opportunity to use duct tape as a structural material, and did so to such an extent that many of the boxes were made up of more tape than cardboard.

Spectators were also treated to the second ever attempt to maneouvre an articulated lorry through the Engineering Department. The easy part was over. The hard part involved fitting the shell into the container, protecting it from almost every possible eventuality*, and then fitting in all the other boxes around it. As a direct consequence of this, Lucy, Jonathan and Barnwell spent a cramped (in the latter two cases) couple of hours wedged underneath Endeavour’s shell, hemmed in by heavy boxes from all sides. Not a job for the claustrophobic – or the ticklish, as it turned out when Jonathan managed to get Lucy’s shoe off – the resulting flailing nearly put a nice knee-shaped hole through the lower shell. It should also be pointed out that the previous night’s dust and wood removal work seemed slightly superfluous on seeing the dusty, wooden floor of the container. As always, however, the team did their bit and managed to remove a significant quantity of wood. Admittedly they then had to spend the next couple of days squeezing it out of themselves with tweezers, and were unable to comfortably lie down for a little while.

Eventually, however, everything was nicely packed in and, with a lucky splinter thrown in for posterity, Endeavour started her journey.

It was nearly cut short several minutes later when the front of the lorry drove off, apparently leaving the back wheels (and container) behind, but after several moments of panic and screaming, somebody finally put two and two together and realised what the company had meant when they had been referring to a ‘sliding chassis’ all morning.

The container with some of the less valuable items to be sent to Australia. Oh, and the lorry driver.

*Not, however, the eventuality of the container being dropped and then being put back upside down**, as happened to someone’s Dodge Viper once. True story.

**Also not the eventuality of pirate attack, Kraken attack, Godzilla attack, or paranoid-Australian-customs-officers-wielding-flamethrowers attack