That John Denver song makes no sense…

So, the flat is packed up (thank you Rae), and its contents are now at Mum’s in Kent. I’m not sure she quite realised how taken over the garage and the small spare room would be, we just have to hope she doesn’t e-bay it all before we get back. 

So we drove down from Battersea yesterday and at some point on the A21 south towards Tunbridge Wells, the words and sadly the tune (I blame your poor musical choices Dad) to ‘Leaving on a jet plane’ kept running through my head (an ear worm I think the Germans call it). Now the words really don’t make that much sense – ‘don’t know when I’ll be back again’ – well why not? Where on earth was he going? And if he hated to go that much he should just have cancelled the sodding ticket as far as I’m concerned.

Funnily enough, Alex got fairly sick of my external monologue pretty soon, so I kept the rest of the analysis of the song to myself  – as it is we haven’t actually left yet, and I’d like him to still be talking to me at least till our second country.

So here’s to sumo, Hello Kitty and sleeping on futons that are bound to be too small for us, and to blog posts that will probably be quite thoughtful and considered from Alex, and just rambling nonsense from me. Feel free, dear reader, to skip to the interesting stuff, I’ll never know…

The map is not the territory.

Almost since we first started talking about this trip we’ve had a map – one of those big wall-maps of the world. As we planned and re-planned our route around the globe we’d plot it on the map using trails of thread and sticky notes.

The masthead photo of this blog is a close-up photo of just a little bit of that criss-crossed map: the little bit we will be rapidly flying away from at around this time on Monday.