Next week, next week

Suddenly everything seems sooo close. On Saturday we received confirmation that we’ve successfully rented our house out for the year – suddenly we don’t have a choice of coming back early, as it’s in the hands of a tenant for 12 whole months! And we also sold Sarah’s car to our window cleaner – and […]

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No more work…

I finished work today, so that’s it – no more working for a year. Or at least, no more sitting at a desk in an office. However, I do have my first deadline for my TES column to meet – it’s got to be submitted by 11th August. That shouldn’t be a pressing deadline, compared […]

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Packing…

Well, we now know how much can fit in a rucksack (or three). On Saturday we laid everything out on a sheet (to take this picture…) And then we packed it all into the rucksacks. Amazingly we had more space in our pack than we had thought, and we could actually all lift our packs!

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Getting closer…

Every day things get more real – we’ve just passed the “two months to go” mark, and are starting to think about really boring practical things – like how much can you fit in a rucksack, where to get travel insurance (we tried lots of different places, but the cheapest by miles was Insure and […]

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Cameras (road-kit)

Having sooo nearly decided on the Nikon 5700, with it’s amazing zoom and resolution, I started thinking and reviewing what I’m looking for a digital camera to do. What we want is something to take our photo’s on this trip, that are good enough to be enlarged a bit, and that are likely to be […]

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Book it

Finally done it – booked the tickets. We are now the proud owners of tickets to fly around the world (GULP!). Having handed in my notice, put our house up for rent and arranged to take Charlotte from school for a year, it made me nervous that we didn’t actually have a flight out of […]

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The shopping begins

This weekend was the first S-Day – Shopping – having looked around London last weekend, and browsed through Ellis Brigham, Snow+Rock, Field & Trek, Blacks, and a few other smaller stores, we had a good idea of the kind of gear we wanted to get first. The key item is of course the rucksack. These […]

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Technology on the road

Today’s dilemma – if we’re going to be taking technology on the road with us, what kind? With our aim to ensure that Charlotte continues her education, and stays in touch with family, friends and school while we’re away, our aim is to take a laptop computer, along with a digital camera and a digital […]

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WeightWatchers

Wonder why we’d be mad enough to give up a (promising) career, nice house and fast car for a backpack and a peripatetic lifestyle? Well, one of the principle reasons has to be related to my diet – and it’s remarkably unsuccessful influence on my waistline. Compare:  And now – badly in need of a […]

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Canada

Started to research what we intend to do, and where we should go in Canada. We’ll be flying into Vancouver early August (when the whole place will be heeeeeaaaaaaving with visitors). Although we’ve found lots of information about travelling around Canada, we’ve found little that gives hints or good ideas for Canada with children. Anyway, […]

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Work

Today was the day when my boss told my department I’m leaving to go around the world. Although I won’t be leaving work until the end of June, we are going through a departmental reorganisation and so it made sense to tell everybody now, so that somebody could be hired to replace me, and leave […]

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The House goes on the web

Having chosen our rental agents, Finders Keepers, they’ve now posted our house up for rent on the Internet. (Got money and clean feet? Take a look at Finders Keepers). They were fast workers – they only took the photo’s yesterday, and today they’ve put it online – must be using some blogger software! Anyway, they […]

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Our RTW Route

Now that we know that our first country to visit will be Canada, it’s time to start researching what we can do as a family in Canada for a month. Having brought the Rough Guide (interesting – last time we travelled RTW we used Lonely Planet almost everywhere, but this time when comparing the two, […]

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School

Sarah and I went to see the Head at school today – to talk about taking Charlotte away from school for the year. Because we’re effectively moving out of the UK for a year, then we don’t have to fulfill any legal obligations about providing education (amazing what you can learn about the subject from […]

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Flights

We’ve chosen our route to be: London-Vancouver-Fiji-Sydney-Auckland-Singapore-Nairobi-London – all in 12 months, starting around 1st August this year. When we called around flight agents (TravelBag, Trailfinders, Airline Network) today it appears that although it’s possible, it’s going to be pretty expensive because of two things – (1) we’re doing a bit of a backtrack to […]

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