Father's day & 6 weeks to go

Empty house but clean floors!

Well I was informed by my eldest (of 4!) today that its my 30th 'Father's Day' and so it seemed a good time to write another post. I am writing this at the house in Thailand we have lived in for several years; but as I look around at the empty floors & walls (our furniture is on a boat heading for the UK), it is clear that things are a changing.

No. 1 child is engaged to be married & doing great things with her art business, no 2 is buying his first house & building his career, no 3 has just got a 1st class honours degree & will start work soon @ no 4 will finish school at the end of this week & be moving to the UK to take up a university place.

What to cook?

The 'boss' is already 'sunning' herself in rural Staffordshire & I am now just ticking off the days here, eating & drinking whatever is left in the cupboards, until I finally close down the Asia branch!

As far as the adventure trip goes, I am now the proud owner of the necessary Visa's for Turkey, Russia, Uzbekistan & China.

The only other visa I may need to get in advance is Kazakhstan, but they are alledgedly going to extend their 1 year visa free trial for another year ... Just waiting to have it confirmed. All of the others can either be obtained on arrival at the border, or are not required for UK citizens.

The Chinese travel agents are working (hard I hope), in the background, to get all the required permits for China sorted, so from a permissions point of biew we are almost there.

July is going to be an interesting pre-trip month, though, there are is still a lot to do in preparation for the adventure. I need to finalise my target route (its always going to change day by day, but this man likes to have an outline plan at least!).

I also need to think about accommodation options, be they camp sites or B&B's and have at least a few decent target stop overs identified. Then there is servicing & preparing the bike, buying spares, tyres & other equipment & figuring out how to carry everything, then deciding you can't and working out what has to be left behind!

On top of that, there will be a shipping container full of things we thought that we would want in the UK arriving at some point. That on its own promises to generate much amusement .... "Who put this is?", ..... "I told you it would'nt fit!", .... "That'll never look right!" ... "We're going to have to change the curtains!" .... Etc etc. ....

Oh!, what fun awaits!