Feeling the fear and doing it anyway...

Tues 10 May NZ...

Well, it’s only a matter of hours, just one more sleep, before we fly the coop from NZ and wing our way to the UK. It’s both nerve-wracking and exciting. Neither of us has traveled this far from home before.

Emirates will take us from Christchurch to Sydney, then to Bangkok, on to Dubai and finally we’ll land at Heathrow. All going well, our homesit hosts, Sophie & Chris, will have sent a taxi to collect and deliver us to Virginia Waters in Surrey. It’ll be much cheaper than us hailing a London Cab at the terminal.

Our bags are bulging. Five months is a long time to plan for and we know we’ll need a good mix of warm and light clothes. We’re in between seasons for both countries and the temperatures in the UK are very similar to ours.

No-one ever told us we’d need a second mortgage just to prepare for the trip. We’ve trawled the travel and outdoor shops for sales and bargains and come up with a few good items…

We’ve got:

• A new travel bag each, with wheels and hidden back-pack straps, but with both our bags weighing in just over 20 kg each (our limit is 30kg each), we’ll need to build up some extra muscles to throw them around.
• Well-designed hiking shoes and sandals – ones with thick soles for walking over all those rough cobblestones.
• Special quick-dry clothes ― tops, trousers and knickers so finely constructed that you could almost wash and wear them straight from the washing machine.
• Individual drawstring cell bags to keep our clothes and gear in order within our big bag ― five months is a long time to live on the go and a messy bag just won’t do.
• Special padlocks that can be opened by airport security should they feel the need to ransack our luggage to raid our vegemite and vogels.
• Sleeping bags that roll up into nothing and silky liners to keep the bedbugs from feasting.
• And we’ve even got rubber door stoppers to keep the light-fingered out of our rooms while we snooze.

We’ve packed every conceivable battery and cord that we’ll need for charging mobiles, cameras, ipod, itouch, and laptop. To make sure we didn’t leave any behind, a good tip was to lay each gadget out on the bed and match its cord with it. So much for technology making life and travel easier!

We’ve also loaded our day packs with everything we think we’ll need on the plane:

• DVT socks to keep our varicose veins from bulging when we’re thousands of metres in the air
• travel sickness tablets to calm the nerves and, if they don’t work, something a little stronger to knock us right out
• squishy little travel pillows to dribble on
• spare knickers, toothbrush and stuff so we arrive fresh and perky
• novels, magazines, and wordfinds to keep us amused

We’ve tried to think of everything but now it’s time to let go and just enjoy the adventure that spreads out before us. We’ve religiously ticked off our to-do-lists, caught up with family and friends, and now the only thing left is to get on the plane. We’re blessed to have family and friends to share our adventure with. So if you haven’t already signed up with your email addy to get regular notification of our blog updates ― what are you waiting for? We’re off and we want to take you with us…