8 sleeps to go

Not that anyone is counting, right?

I look at this and think to myself, this is fitting on my bike?? Good thing James is coming along too.

I detest packing.

The Beginning

Every good story has a beginning, actually it turns out I'm kind of fascinated by how things start; Probably why I've mostly worked with startup companies and have so many different interests ... Anyway, Alex and I had been talking on and off for a while about going back to live in the UK for a while, Abergavenny, Sheffield, Cambridge or perhaps somewhere near Mt Snowdon. Almost a year ago exactlly, it happened like this:

We are out running in the dark, not that unusual; though we were talking this day which is. "Alex, do you really want to go live in the UK for a year ?" .... "Yeeeees" she says .... "Do you really want to go over there and work, or do you just want to spend days scrabling around castles, ruins and poking around old libraries ?" .... "Yeeees, but how do we afford it ?"

A fair question, the 5 weeks we spent in the UK last time cost us a small fortune, between 4000 miles of car hire, petrol and accommodation. Not to mention eating out nearly every meal for 5 weeks. It was also too fast, we covered lots of ground, and saw lots - by most standards we took time to take the place in, 2 full days here, 3 full days there. It was wonderful, but also too short.

I've been restless for a while now, itching for a grand adventure of some kind for a while now but I hadn't really been thinking about this as a possible one, I've been more focused on projects a bit closer to home. Out of the blue I said "What if we rode our bikes ?", "Madness" says Alex. "No really, it would be way cheaper, and we would go slowly, take pictures, stop, camp, see things properly", "How long for ?" a nervous reply ... some rough mental calculations about the cost of food, camping and the odd night somewhere decent ... how long would it take to see what we wanted to see ... a full circumnavigation + some more ? 8000 miles ... "5 or 6 months" and there the journey begins... We planned, we saved and the journey begins.

Now in just over 2 weeks we leave.