April Fool Day, 2009

After about 4 years of planning, the day of departure has finally arrived and as usual, the last few days have been more than a little hectic. Especially given our brushes with the criminal elements of late. We've been having repairmen of all sorts traipsing through our house trying to get it back into shape so that rosie can live in it safely for the next few months. One of the things that has been at the bottom of the priority list has been what our exact itinerary will be aand we still don't know. We know the broad strokes but we're going to have to make it up a little bit as we go along.

Going for this long and especially since we will be doing a fair amount of financially enforced camping; luggage is a real problem. Even more so since I want to take my bicycle along for the ride. After carefull examination of the BA website we found that in addition to the normal baggage (2xhand luggage + 2xchecked luggage) we could take 'sports equipment', one piece maximum of 23 kg. The bicycle box I borrowed from graeme weighed 16kg on its own so that wasn't going to work so I had a cardboard box made and the bike, the box and a couple of sleeping bags ('packaging' to anyone that wants to know) it came to 22.5 kg. In the end all our luggarge was within 0.5kg of the maximum allowed which is quite and achievement.

From the photo you can see the bicycle on the left in the big box; I had my doubts as to whether they really would allow it on the aircraft but surprise, surprise - they did and no questions asked.


We weren't so lucky with the benzine bottle for the cooker even though it was open and empty; it hadn't been washed with soapy water! I ask you with tears in my eyes; so we left the bottle behind but have managed to get everything else through.

An unexpected disadvantage of traveling with a bicycle is that one can't see over it when pushing the trolley and I accidentally ran into a person in a wheelchair who had crossed my path. Felt a bit bad but I'm over it now.

I'm currently sitting in the news cafe waiting for caron to return from a foraging expedition for cancer sticks and we should be boarding the plane in about 10 minutes.