Preparation

This trip has probably been 10 years in the making. I am not ashamed at all to say that it was all Nicola's idea. She's the ideas man. Since we returned back from our Africa overland trip in 2009, we have been dreaming of the next big trip. When the kids arrived in 2011 and 2013, the vision became "the big trip we can take our kids on".  The vision for the trip evolved slowly and gathered speed. Our preparation took many forms.   We took a practice trip taking  public transport around South Africa in 2019. The date was set: July 2020 - we started the planning around 2018 and by March 2020 we were all set to go. Then COVID happened and derailed the whole thing. We waited and wondered - (when) would we ever be able to do the trip? 

By June 2022, many of the COVID travel restrictions had eased and we decided to pull the trigger. A white Christmas in Austria was on the cards, and as a result we decided to flip our original trip plan from Bali to Belfast. We'd head to Europe and travel Eastwards, 'coddiwompling' - heading purposefully in a vague direction...