February - 2010

21 days and counting

Well this is certainly creeping up quickly, and with houses still part renovated, and ongoing work commitments time is certainly getting tight now.

Visas

Good news on the Algerian and Nigerian visas which have both been approved, no news from Angola or Syria just yet but we’re keeping everything crossed!

Loose Ends

Ongoing work now is mainly centred around getting locations for all the foreign embassies along the route and their accompanying GPS locations.  This is proving a challenge, and we’ve resorted to using Google earth for most of the coordinates.

Interestingly we received some feedback from the GPS people who run Tracks 4 Africa, they sent our query onto a guy at the UN who replied...

UNEP has naught, and I concur with Rob the Grey that this is likely to be tough call given that FOE (the Forces of Evil) also hack Google Earth et al. 

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Interestingly there are many countries in the world where Garmin do not offer maps, but Nokia do.  Because of this we have decided to also take a GPS equipped mobile phone, with the maps preloaded for the places where Garmin don't go.  I’m not sure how well this is going to work, but will find out in the next week or so.

The last bit of prep work now underway is to insert a quick connector into the video cable connecting the cameras to the recording units.  Sounds simple enough, but with 8 signals in a 5mm shielded cable the connector needs to be something pretty special.  Hopefully this works ok as it would be handy to be able to take the helmet off and leave the hydropack (recording unit) on.

Done

First Aid course—we just completed our first aid course which was very interesting and hopefully will prove to be completely useless while we are away :)

2nd March 2010

Going Away Drinks at The Edinburgh Castle

As you can probably imagine things are getting pretty busy right now, but in between packing my house, packing my bags and packing 5hit (I promised Zia Maria I’d watch the language from now on)  I wanted to write a quick email to say thanks.

 Thanks to all those who came along to the Ed Castle – I didn’t realize we knew so many people!  I think a great day was had by all, and we managed to raise another $522 for the ACRF, which now puts us exactly half way to the goal, special thanks to Molly for doing such a great job selling tickets all day.

 To the Ed Castle, Italian Motorcycles, Mr and Mrs Molly and my Mum – thanks for donating the prizes for the raffle, I think it must be the first raffle where more was given away in prizes than what was earned in ticket sales!

 More thanks to my Mum for organising all the meds we need to take with us, Ma you’re a champion!  Now we just need to work out where to put them all!

 As some of you may already know we’ve been delayed by 2 days, so now depart on Thursday, the plan to pick up Angolan visas in Singapore didn’t work out so now we’re going directly to Capetown and will work out the visa en route.  In better news, Adam our transport guru tells me the bikes arrived safe and sound, so we’re all set for a frantic crate stripping and bike reassembly on Friday afternoon – how exciting!

 I’ll have some more time to update the web page on the plane and also in the 6hr stopover in Singapore - so stay tuned for a bleary eyed update in a few days.

 Take care all,

The Mule.

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