I've been a bit quiet...

We leave in under a week for Singapore (cue excited sounds), so we've been tying up lots of loose ends. For the first time ever we were almost packed more than a week before our departure date - it wasn't a pain free task, and it took a whole day to go through the mounds of 'stuff' that we've collected over the last 6 months. I'm glad to say that this time around I think we really do see it as just stuff, and while my sister-in-law is being kind enough to store three or four boxes in her loft, we've been a lot more ruthless than we were when we left Sydney, giving away so many things and I'm pretty sure we'll leave here with at least one less suitcase than we arrived with, thankfully, given we didn't really have enough hands to manage them all last time!

Sorting through our supposedly meagre possessions!

We're up to date now with doctor and dentist visits, and we've got spares of the littlest hobo's medications which makes me feel a lot more at ease about being on the move with her. I've also been on a couple of shopping trips, as the littlest hobo was thoughtful enough to have a massive growth spurt in the last couple of weeks, which means that we can buy her some trousers that aren't hovering above her ankles from the wide selection of favourably priced options that the UK has to offer, in comparison to Antipodean wares.

We've spent time catching up with some dear friends and family who we haven't spent enough time with while we've been in the UK - and spending time with these people definitely puts a UK vote on the where-to-live-when-we've-finished-travelling-o-meter for me, although the weather is less than endearing, and I'm sure that once I see our Aussie friends and family in a few weeks I'll feel completely torn once again.

We've planned and re-planned our trip, and chopped and changed our minds about what we want to do. We have booked our flights back to the UK later in the year so that we can see my nephew and soon to be niece-in-law tie the knot. We'd been scouting about to get prices for our budget (yes really, a budget is actually coming together, at long last) and I stumbled upon an amazing deal with Iceland Air so we snapped it up and added a few days in Reykjavik to our travels. The budget has been an interesting and long overdue project - luckily we had come up with similar calculations in our heads of how much we wanted to spend overall, so now we just have to make it work.

I've made a half hearted effort at getting all my digital ducks into a row, mainly driven by trip planning and wanting to have some new mediums to conduct travel research, so I logged back onto Twitter after two years absence. It's a different place to the one that I snubbed back then, and although I'm still finding my way and have a lot of learning to do, the first 24 hours have been quite a pleasant experience and it seems to be proving it's worth much more than previously. I need to get my head around those hash tags though! I've also been making sure all my photo back ups are up to date and making the most of cloud computing to ensure that everything we need should be accessible wherever we have an internet connection on the road.

Mr T is in Amsterdam living it up on a lads trip at the moment, and tomorrow, just as he returns I am meeting up with 6 old uni friends, all but one of whom I haven't seen for over 10 years, and it's almost 15 years since our little group formed when we found ourselves bundled together as freshers in our halls of residence. It seemed like a great idea when we started organising it, but as the time has approached I feel so nervous about seeing all of these people again, when I feel like such a different person now. I've spoken to a couple of them on the phone and the nervousness seems to be running rife amongst us all, but it is exciting too!

We've got a busy week ahead of us catching up with more friends and family one last time before we head off, so I haven't really got that feeling of waiting around and being desperate to get going, more one of trying to cram every last thing into the time that I can (better cramming people into days than extra clothing into suitcases!), which seems far preferable. The reality that we are going to be spending the next 9 months floating around hasn't really sunk in yet, I've a feeling it won't hit until we're on the plane, or maybe until we've been to all the familiar places in Australia and been exploring for a couple of weeks.

There's not a lot else to say for now; I had a few ideas for blog posts to write in this time, but in the supposed lull before the storm I haven't found myself with much writing time on my hands, so I'll save them for 'Ron.