WestwardGo!

Our journey has officially begun! After final (slightly teary in Amy's case) goodbyes to Devon family and Ted we set off from Tiverton and headed north to a surprisingly sunny Stockport by train. Whilst mostly an uneventful journey other than seat thievery we did encounter the worst and most dreaded 3 word sentance in the English language: Replacement Bus Service This also meant we had to battle through Birmingham city centre traffic and were greeted at the train station by opposing groups of footy fans in the midst of a fight/riot on the platform which was quickly brought under control by a small army of police officers, welcome to Stockport! We now have a couple of days before flying out to Canada which will be spent saying our farewells to more family and friends and spending Mike's car money on headphones, noise cancelling ones are essential for travel apparently.

We did a dummy pack this evening, involving making many, many piles of various things.   According to the dogs we absolutely MUST pack a tennis ball as this is the singular most important thing in the universe. Furry helpers are not as helpful as they think they are!  It's funny how after 26 years my life can be condensed into a single bag. So now all thats left is packing up of electronics, toiletries and photocopying important documents and we are pretty much good to go! (As soon as Mike leaves his bag unattended I can sneak in several more pairs of my shoes into his bag, he won't notice right?)

First things first, this is the first post on the new snazzy lightweight travel laptop! Oooh so fast, so light... Anyway, this post is about saying our goodbyes and farewells. Both of us have now finished our last days at work, many treats, cakes and hugs were had by all. We came back to Devon 2 years ago as a temporary measure and ended up really feeling at home and wanting to stay for longer. Big thanks to all colleaques at TDC and NDDH for everything. Family dinners have been had, days out arranged and flying visits planned to friends and family far and wide. As we are going to try and stay in contact with them it's more of a "see you later" than goodbye. The hardest goodbye is therefore to Ted, our dog, because we can't explain to him that we are not abandoning him forever. He has enriched our lives from the day he was born, always noisy and upside down. We always speculated that if he spent less time upside down maybe his legs wouldn't be so s

Today we have finalised our accommodation for the entire trip all the way to NZ :) Waking up this morning we had several gaps in our itinerary where we hadn't yet booked places to stay, there were a few days in Toronto, Vancouver and San Francisco which needed organising. The original plan was to use hostels almost exclusively but the prices (£30pppn!!! For an 8 bed dorm...) in the USA and Canada soon had us rethinking. We had already faced this challenge when booking accommodation in Banff and had eventually settled on a mediocre looking hotel. This was before we were enlightened to the wonders of Airbnb. We had a look at what may be available on Airbnb instead of the hotel and have "upgraded" (with a saving of £150!) to a full apartment with private HOT TUB and garden/bbq all with views of the mountains :D Further browsing on Airbnb led to bookings for 5 nights in Vancouver (before we pick up the van) and 3 nights in San Francisco (between van drop off and flying o

What do you take on a 12 month adventure?  We've started accumulating useful things, below is what we've gathered so far. Some items such as the camera, charging bank, water filter, packing cubes, padlocks and travel towels are essential and are certainly coming with us. Others like the travel pillow, Alpkit rucksack, gorillapod tripod and wind-up radio are luxuries so will have to earn their way into the bags (Amy insists the radio is as important as a camera, we shall see...). What we take is largely dictated by the type of trip we're doing and the accommodation we're using. As we're staying in hostels, hotels, a campervan and the occasional AirBnB bedding is not an issue and cooking is taken care of. As a result we are taking daily essentials, some gadgets/accessories and then some items which either make daily life a little easier (see mechanical food processor) or help reduce our waste (see bags, collapsible bowls and cutlery).  As for clothes,

Alongside our general planning (cities, states, method of transport etc) we have also been gathering information about places we'd like to visit as we travel. For many months now I have been making notes of any places which have piqued my interest which may be along our proposed routes, I've used so many sources for this information it's difficult to list them all but they include; random posts online (reddit etc), travel blogs, TV programs, travel brochures, photographers, news items, first hand recommendations, second hand 'I know somebody who went to...' etc. I add to this list daily and some of you are probably familiar with me taking my phone out to make notes whilst telling me about your trip to somewhere in Canada, USA or NZ. I now have a good length list which contains more places than we could hope to visit and is broken down by country, state and city. I was never really sure what I was going to do with this information but today I found a great

Hello and welcome! This blog is to keep you all updated on where we are, and what we are doing - with some photographic evidence along the way. As many of you are aware we have been planning this for several years now and have been talking about it almost nonstop (sorry, not sorry)! We have discussed at length everything from which type of bag to use (old suitcases or new clever rucksacks - spoiler alert - we went shopping today) to how scared we should be of bears whilst pooping in the woods (very, apparently). After months of deliberation and changing our minds almost everyday we settled on the plan below. Stage 1 - Canada Fly to Toronto, 'av a gander at Niagara falls, catch a 3 day train to Jasper. Hire a car in Jasper, explore Banff National Park for a week or so, then hop back on the train for another couple of nights to get to Vancouver. From Vancouver we pick up our home for the next 2 1/2 months - courtesy of Escape Campervans. We will explore a little o