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) hear you cry? Nothing really to write home about other than research, research, research and planning, planning planning! In the past when other people were organising their trips and talked about planning, I often wondered what this actually involved so allow me to give you a little insight into what it means to us.

Our itinerary has evolved organically and has, due to all sorts of reasons, been narrowed down to a select group of countries. Now we're looking within these countries with the help of (library) books, magazines, travel guides, podcasts, radio and tv programmes, various travel internet sites and the old faithful, Google, to investigate where precisely we'd like to visit, what there is to see, what the weather will be like, the logistics of getting to various places/events, how much the accommodation and transport will cost, adding various places and removing others from our list as we go. It's a very time consuming process but we love every minute!! And hopefully our prior preparation will prevent...well you know the rest!

By the way, if anyone has any ideas of where we can garner further information about places we're (currently) intending to visit (see our itinerary) then feel free to share them with us and we'll be only too glad to add them to our list of resources!!

On top of this and following the success of our wedding (well in our heads anyway) we have spent some time scouring Leicester for a suitable venue to host a leaving party in February before we board the plane in March next year. We'll say nothing more at this stage but invitations are being designed as we speak and will be winging their way to you in due course!

Hopefully the next update will be a little more exciting for everyone involved - we're planning to meet again with our travel agent in December to book some more stuff. The next items on our list include possible flights from Cape Town to Quito, Ecuador via Heathrow (what a day that promises to be!!) and accommodation in Moscow for the first night of our 400 day odyssey.