September, 2001
It's starting to become an annual tradition for IF people in the UK to gather for an autumn meet, usually at the behest of David "hjalfi" Given. Twice previously we'd gone to maize mazes, but in 2001 we decided to look for some interesting caves instead. We settled on Chistlehurst because it's easily accessible from London -- there are probably better caves around, but they're all off in far-flung reaches of the country.
The first person we met at the train station was veek. We immediately started assaulting each other with digital cameras.
Here's the entire group assembled outside Chistlehurst station. From the left, we have: hjalfi, Storme, Jon, ghira, Oren, veek and Psmith.
At this point we were still waiting for a certain Brian to turn up. However, he hadn't met any of us before and none of us had met him, and we weren't sure whether he was coming or not anyway, which made things a little tricky.
I'm sure we didn't look at all suspicious to anyone driving past as we hung around outside the station chatting and taking photographs.
Eventually we decided that he probably wasn't coming, and headed off to find the caves.
Storme valiantly defends herself from the camera.
Turn right for the caves!
No, turn left!
Despite having a camera surgically attached to her face, Borg-veek neatly avoids all the muddy puddles.
Finally we reached the caves -- or rather, the visitor centre outside the caves. Having come this far, even the terrifying postcards were unable to dissuade us from going inside!