Luggage test run

30 days 'till we leave Guernsey.

Until today it was all very theoretical. We'd bought clothes, sleeping bags, a tent etc thinking "hey lets go around the world". Each time we bought something new it went into a pile in the loft which grew steadily larger.

So, step one, today we took the mountain of kit out of the loft and put it together in one place (photo). It's not quite fully packed up with all of our clothes etc, but it's mostly there and there was quite a bit of space left in rucsacs for some underwear at least. We also weighed the bags which were complete to make sure the weight was reasonably distributed and found that we needed to rebalance a little.

Next we thought we had better have a trial run of actually moving it all. If we couldn't make it to the end of the street then round the world might be a bit optimistic. As the photos show it was a success (though the dry run did not include any children). What some of the photos don't show clearly is that it was actually still in daylight when we did this, I think we need more practise with the new camera.

I've also made a slight change to the web setup for this blog. You can now also get here at http://www.veholmes.com/ as well as the direct, but longer, http://www.holmesworldtrip.blogspot.com/.

Also, last night was my work leaving party (three weeks before I finish work!). The party was a joint leaving celebration for two colleagues returning to Glasgow after a six month work placement in Guernsey and had a film character fancy dress theme.

Looking over the next four weeks there is still a lot to do, so we should be able to update a bit more frequently.

Dave

Alternative route across the US??

Turns out you can drive from East to West coast in only 31 hours (see map). Maybe a revision to the plan, just need to get a BMW M5, some radar jamming equipment........oh and a spotter plane.

Getting ready to go

Hello, it is Nicola here. I have finally found five minutes to write an update on this Blog...so what have we been up to? Well, we have exchanged contracts on our house, which was a big relief and we move out just before we leave Guernsey. We have started packing, sorting, tidying, emptying etc...we started with a lot of enthusiasm but to be honest that got a bit boring after a while! We have arranged some storage in Guernsey for the things we want to keep (okay, really mainly things I want to keep) and have started gradually moving boxes into the store.

The current task is that we need to sell our car, so David spent three hours cleaning it on Sunday (thank you David!), so if you are looking for a Citroen Xsara Picasso then please do get in touch!

We are starting to go through some of our 'last evers', which has been quite sad. We have had last swimming lessons, judo lessons and last day at school is tomorrow for Peter. The saddest goodbyes are yet to come though!

Despite being sad to leave Guernsey, which has become our home over the last five years, we are very excited about the adventure ahead. The next challenge is to pack all the stuff that five people need for a year into two rucksacks...