Hi all and welcome to my first world wide Blog entry!

I'm sure I've probably bored most of you to death with rambling on about this trip, so if you can still bear to hear anything else about it you've come to the right place! I can't promise that my writings will always be witty, insightful or even interesting, but I'll do my best to keep you all updated. I will be writing about the good, the bad and the plain ugly & will come back as often as I can.

So, where to begin? I thought I would start writing my travel Blog before I left so I could capture as much of the adventure as possible. I'm sure it would be more interesting to have the first Blog post from the first exotic location, but this has been such a huge dream of mine that I thought I would start it from the beginning. :)

So I've had to think about who this Blog is for and why I want to write one. I could obviously just spend the time in the local boozer, or upload a tonne of pics every now and again to Facebook to make as many people as possible green with envy, and whilst that would of course have it's kicks, it's not really what I want. I want to be able to share as much of what I'm doing with my family and friends as possible, even if it's simply so you don't all think I've disappeared off the face of the planet, and wonder why I turn up a year later as a hippy! Stranger things have happened! lol :)

For those who know me well, you'll know you can hardly get a word in edgeways (I mean look I've written 3 paragraphs already without even so much as a mention of the plan!) so here goes ... I will be going with one of my bestest buds - Selena. We are slowly but surely researching everywhere we want to go in books, magazines, travel sites, TV programmes and chatting to lots of people to get their advice. I've been hunting through UNESCO World heritage sites for inspiration, looking at the wonders of the world (surprisingly there are a lot more than 7!) and have also been looking for some 'once in a lifetime experiences' such as helicopter tours through the Grand Canyon. To help in our planning I have brought a big map and stuck it on my wall and it's filling up very quickly. A clear trend is appearing which is mainly North America, New Zealand, Australia, SE and East Asia.

The current plan is ...

We are planning on leaving Mid April / Beginning of may, and want to go to the following places:

• America (2 months)
• Fiji (1 week)
• New Zealand (6 weeks)
• Australia & Tasmania (4 months)
• Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia & China (3.5 months)

So that's the plan. I will come back soon when we've booked the tickets and have bit more of an update.

Xx.