Making the decision to try and ride our bike around the world was hard work and, having gotten that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we settled back to await the start of our adventure. A couple of weeks of reverie drifted by before the obvious became obvious: nothing would happen because we wished it, we needed to get some planning done!

Once we got over the initial shock of deciding to go, the problem of planning seemed almost overwhelming. We needed to organise at least a general itinerary to give us a framework for planning and even this seemed designed to frustrate us. To start with, the Rugby World Cup and our daughter's wedding were timed to leave us at the start of the ride home at the start of winter. Since I get cold on a winter ride in south east Queensland, Russia in winter was a bad joke for me and Jo has never had enough padding to survive a siege.

Hanging around and enjoying the comforts of Western Europe for a winter didn't seem like a good idea with the parlous state of the "A" dollar. Our best option was south to Africa for a warm and relatively cheap winter before emerging in the Spring to ride north with the sun. This would, so the planning goes, get us to the start of the trans-continental ride at the start of summer. The only other important bit was to decide to ship out of Vladivostock in August 2008.

Well, it wasn't the best plan, but it was a plan. The rest is just the detail!