Life Is One Long To-Do List
Well, we finally took the plunge and booked the tickets! We had previously been planning to wait until our flat had been sold before we went, but we had a sea change when Jenny questioned what was keeping us here. With no good answer, we decided just to get on with it – the estate agents and solicitors can deal with selling the flat in our absence; that’s what we’re paying them for!
So we leave on October 16th, in four weeks. Suddenly this project has moved from the realm of web pages and guidebooks into something much more tangible and frightening. And David has suddenly got very organised; he’s drawn up a huge checklist of things to be bought, sold and organised, accounts closed and the rest of the tasks involved with putting your life on ice. In a bit of a rush we got our travel insurance sorted and the first week’s hostel accommodation booked.
Because we’re ‘hostel virgins’ and used to our own space, we’ve booked a private double room. We think this will be an advantage for at least the first few days when we’ll need to catch up on sleep. It may well be the case that we try a dorm room a bit later on, but Jenny turns very grumpy when sleep deprived and we figure that’s probably not conducive to making friends!
Last weekend we went to the West End of London. Specifically Covent Garden, where for some reason there’s a profusion of camping and outdoor shops. Actually, what is the collective noun for camping shops; maybe a daysac or a carabiner? Anyway, David was quite excited about putting some of his web research to use; he decided to get travelpacks since we’ll mostly be in hostels (and he hated having to rummage through everything in the pack through the hole at the top when he was interrailing). He also decided to hang the expense and buy the best packs we could find because we don’t need to be repairing or replacing packs when seams or zippers fail halfway through Kakadu! We ended up with Macpac sacks – Gemini for him, Orient Express for Jenny – which feel utterly bombproof and come with lifetime warranties. Jenny looks like a snail in hers as she’s only 5′ tall.
The other thing David’s taken an interest in is photography. Looking through his old photos, he’s decided that he wants to bring back a quality photographic record of this trip, and not the grainy, dull snaps he’s managed in the past. So he’s decided that when the flat sells, he’s going to spend some of the money on a decent camera and they’ll both do a photo course in Sydney. Jenny has a penchant for taking photos of very flat sea and the horizon, so David’s hoping to beat this out of her.
It’s quite a strange time at the moment. We’ve got a month to go but there’s actually very little to do now. All the banking and money stuff has been arranged, direct debits cancelled and addresses changed etc, and the storage and removal has been arranged. The only real thing we’ve got left to do is to pack, which of course we can’t do for a good couple of weeks yet. So it feels a bit like a lull, like we’re waiting for everything to happen. We’ve got a leaving do to arrange and people to see, but apart from that, we’re dreaming of the moment the plane takes off�
