This is the start of my adventure journal. Thought I would start at the very beginning and explain how this crazy plan came about. Modern technology is a wonderful thing and unlike my sister and cousin who had to rely on airmail and posting home tapes recording their trip 20 years ago, I have the means to update this blog throughout the planning stages as well as during the adventure, so bear with me..this first few pages will be the longest bit to read, it just puts everything into perspective...hope you enjoy if not feel free to stop reading!!!

Well as all my friends and family know, it has been a hell of a year...well nearly two actually...Things were going very well thank you since we moved to Liverpool in 2005...jobs were fab, kids were happy (ok, there were a few blips) but essentially life was good. Ray was working with a great company called Bizarre Creations who had recently been bought out by Activision and I was managing an LLDD department at Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College near Manchester....then everything went a bit rubbish...starting when my beautiful three decided they needed to leave home, obviously the natural progression of things and absolutely how it should be.

Of course I worried myself inside out about how they would cope away from home and being as Tom and Louise had chosen to go back to Portsmouth to work and Joe was going to study music production at Brighton university, my worry was that we were so far away should they need us or should anything go wrong. I didnt for one minute think that it would be me who wouldn't cope without them, didn't even occur to me that those kids had become an amazing constant in my life and losing them and the family life we had was like losing a limb, like some kind of bereavement where no one had died...some crap stuff has happened to me and us over the years but we got through it together, we are a fab little team me and my three.

Jo left for uni in the September , the last to go and those following days were awful. We lived in a large house in Liverpool which was filled with noise, fun, rows, busyness, music, mess and well..life!. Everyday I would drive back from work and dread going in through the front door to silence and the realisation that this bit of my life, the bit where I was their mum, the stalwart, the manager, the bailer outer, the confidant, the councillor, the hugger, the moaner, the adorer, the loving mum, the problem solver, their friend at home was done...25 years..finished. Now that is how I felt then but as time has gone on I now know that actually none of that was the case, I was and am still all of those things to them and I do still have a vital role in their lives, they just dont live here anymore, so its a bit quieter and tidier at times but thats all...we are still ok , me and the three! I am incredibly proud of all of them, they are beautiful people.... I would say to any who has children though...brace yourself , the day they leave will break you...so make the most of every moment of everyday with them...

In order to stop my sadness of returning home to an empty house, Ray and I decided to move to Wilmslow, I would be nearer my job and friends and I had joined a little band called 'The Grizzly Sisters' and we were having fun. We moved to Dean Drive on the 25th of October 2010 and we loved it there then on 16th November..Ray came home and told me that that Activision were shutting the studio and they had all been made redundant. As the weeks went on it became apparent that for environment artists working in the games industry, jobs in the North West were very few. All indications pointed towards the south being the place for Ray to find work which meant that we would up sticks and move back home.

I applied to East Surrey College, which turned out to be a massive mistake and Ray got a job at EA in Guildford.

In May 2011 I had to say goodbye to my amazing friends up north. These people had taken me under their wing, looked after me, embraced my southerness (with a bit of mickey taking thrown in!!) supported me,believed in me, trusted me and have been and will be friends for life. Nothing can beat the warmness of the northern character and I miss it and them daily..we southerners can be a bit cold sometimes..(now there's irony!!)

I also had a department of extremely vulnerable but incredible students who I have been privilaged to watch achieve fantastic things through adversity for six years and have I felt very proud to have been involved with them, so many memories , so much heart ache but so much fun I could write a book (maybe one day!)....anyway the leaving was so, so hard and again...emotionally, it broke me.

There were two positives about moving back down south; obviously we were returning to the kids and our friends and family which we always said we'd do one day and secondly we found the most beautiful place to live. Lynwick Forge in Rudgwick , West Sussex...off the beaten track and in the middle of the countryside. We were seriously excited about getting that place.

We started our new jobs. Ray soon became disillusioned with his as they werent allowing him to be the incredible artist that he is and to realise his full creative potential and I had a terrible time adjusting to a strange, money driven college, were the individual vulnerable learner and the safe guarding of them was the last consideration and bums on seats, corner cutting and funding was the first priority. The principal herself even apologised to me when I handed her my notice and admitted they had 'lost sight' of why they employed me!!

After 5 months of incredible emotional stress and worry culminating in a bout of acute depression , I left. Ray suggested that I rested up and find something else that made me happy. .. bless him, I so needed to do that. He carried us both , I am very very lucky to have found such a strong man who is still happy to put up with me and my madness ( and there has been a lot of that over the years!!)

During all of the recent roller coaster of craziness and in the years before, Ray and I had often talked of going travelling...real proper back packing, getting away from it all, seeing the world, meeting strange people, trying strange things, going to strange places, eating strange stuff ..hee hee...he had done a bit of that in his twenties but of course I had been having my babies in my twenties so apart from the occasional European holiday and a couple of bonkers trips to New York and Boston opportunities to really explore this amazing world hadnt arisen.

'Right' said Ray one day when another one of my job applications had failed to materialise into an interview, 'lets do it, sod it, lets go, lets do our trip, we always said we would, we now have a window of opportunity'....

For the first time ever I could nt say ' no, I cant leave the kids or what about work or what about the mortgage or what about our parents??'... the kids are fine, work is nt the amazing fullfilling thing it used to be, we dont have a mortgage, parents are ok at the moment.......anything else?....erm money?? ...nah.....we'll be ok ...no excuses then.....gulp!!

So that's it, we are going, life has moved on a chapter and looking back on all that's happened , life is going past very very fast. So we are going to cram some adventures in and have more stories to tell in our twilight years which are just around the corner so as a very wise and much loved man once said to me ' grasp the nettle!! '.......so that's it, we are going!!....blimey!! x