Our Journey

It seemed like an odd question to me, but I was surprised at the number of people who asked ‘Why?’ when we first started talking about making this trip.  Surely ‘Why not?’ is the more obvious question??

Jason and I had been together for a couple of years when we first started talking about going somewhere on an extended trip.  Initially, we had no idea what to do or where to go, or how to get there.  All we knew was we were a couple of 30-somethings, getting closer to 40-somethings all the time, with no kids, no pets and jobs that we enjoyed but certainly weren’t going to let tie us down for the next 20+ years.

The more we researched and looked at travellers websites (which we did lots of, for months on end!), the more varied and wide-ranging it became apparent peoples motives were.  As we got more involved in the decision making process for ourselves, the more we realised that from our perspective, it was mostly simply about getting out there to see what there was to see.  Yes, we’d like to give something back and help out others along the way if we can (Jason is a civil engineer so maybe we can stop off and help out with building projects?), and yes there’s the argument that people from our generation should see specific sights in the world while they’re still there to be seen, and for sure simply not having to go to work for months and months and months can’t be a bad thing, but none of those reasons was a driving force in our decision.

So oddly, after months of talking around it and not really making a decision, we came to a point where we realised a decision had been made without us really realising it!  If there’s something we could be doing, and we like the sound of it, and there’s no reason not to do it, why were we still talking about it?!  Decision made!

The original version of this website was then created in an attempt to map our preparation for the trip, and act as a diary for the journey itself.  I’d not created a website before and simply didn’t have the cash to spend on the ‘posher’ software that was available at the time, plus the ability to update pages whilst offline was essential, so none of the easily available blog sites were of any use.  I settled on WebX5 and merrily tapped away.  Only after hundreds of files had been created, months and months later, did I start to realise the limitations of the software compared to what I needed it to do.  So there I found myself almost a year since we left our house in Suffolk and almost 18 months since I started playing with websites, creating Version2 on completely new software, messing around with copying and pasting a million files and trying to not disturb the flow of things too much whilst adding lots more pictures to the historical Trip files (basically everything pre-April 2008).  You’d think I had too much time on my hands, wouldn’t you, but you’d be soooo wrong!  

Apologies for those of you who don’t like to see so much text on a home page, but I’ve had a few queries from people asking why we started thinking about a trip, so I thought I’d put an explanation here because I couldn’t think of anywhere better!

If I can have your indulgence for just a final few moments, a word about this site and its navigation.  Dizzy blonde that I am, I foolishly thought I could self-teach myself this software and it’d all be fine.  Which in fairness to blondes everywhere, to a large extent has been the case.  However, I’m now finding that things are not entirely as they should be.  I wont bore you with all the details, but suffice to say that sometimes there’s more updates available to view than you can see, depending on where you’re looking from.  I will be fixing this in a permanent fashion in the not too distant, but it wont be quick work so in the meantime there’s going to have to be a bit of a workaround.  So, as and when I post any changes to any elements of the site (typically to The Trip and to Moglet), I’ll put a link to the newest entry here on the homepage - this will then bounce you to the latest bits, and from there you should be able to see everything.  If at any time something isn’t there that you think should be, jump back to this homepage and then take a look again at the links at the top of the page.  It’s all to do with Master pages and NavBars in the wrong place, it hurts my head to think about it, but at least this way you should be able to see all the latest diary entries etc.

So, for the latest diary entry, 24- 27th June, click here.

And as a final comment, my apologies for the lack of photos from 17th June onwards - major issues with my laptop meant I needed to reinstall the entire hard drive based on a backup from November 2009, which has removed a couple of programs.  Most have been reinstalled, but Photoshop (which I use to shrink images down to a reasonable size) needs to be put back from the install disk that’s currently languishing at my parents house in France. C’est la vie!  Installation and loading up of historic photos will happen as soon as possible (likely to be early /mid August).  Thank you :-)