Finished work? Check. Leaving drinks? Check. Jabs? Check. Rucksack packed? Check. After years of planning and saving we're finally on the home straight before the epic journey begins The enormity of what we're doing is starting to dawn on us and the maelstrom of emotion is beginning to take effect. Excitement, trepidation, nervousness, disbelief. Put simply: we're all over the place! One of the hardest things to do for the trip will be no surprise to anyone rea...

V is for vaccinations and visas. Which sums up pretty much what has been keeping us busy since the last blog entry. We've had a frustrating time over the past few weeks with our local doctors' surgery. There's been a fair amount of stress caused by various issues such as a part-time GP not having time to review Kirsty's forms, miscommunication between the travel nurse and the GP, misunderstanding about who was advising who, ill-informed receptionists panick...

Merry Christmas to all our readers!! Sucking a honey and lemon locket, chewing a Mars bar and shielding ourselves from the icy rain, we traipsed across town to meet up with David, our humorous travel agent, for what will probably be the penultimate time. After securing ourselves a free cup of tea it was down to business as we had much to discuss. First up on the agenda was solving the issue of getting from Cape Town to Quito. Initially the thinking was that ...

Almost exactly three months before the off we have finally secured our very first step. On 5th March 2012, we're bundling our rucksacks into a National Express coach down to Heathrow, spending the evening in a hotel near to the airport before getting going early on 6th to Heathrow with our flight leaving at 06.40. For those interested in the fine details, although our destination is Moscow, we're actually flying to Copenhagen before changing flights for Moscow, ...

With it being about a month since our last entry, we felt it was time to dust down the old laptop and update you all once again on what we've been up to since we last wrote. So what have we been doing? Well the big news is that my wife has a passport, Kirsty Hanes officially exists!!! Good news all round and means we're now able to confirm our provisional bookings (see previous blog entries!) and more easily book anything further we need. What else I (don't) he...