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What a rollercoaster ride it is when you start planning a 7 month adventure through 25 countries, everything appears easy until you get into the detail! To remind us of this, we recently dusted off our old DVD player to watch Charley & Ewan in Long Way Round and then wished we had the team they had to help us plan. Fortunately for us, we do have one advantage over them in that we already have our bikes, BMWs of course.
So what's happend? Our bike was collected on the 15th November and we thought it was well on the way to Sydney. Last week, we got a call from our shippers to say it had been removed from the container for ‘operational’ reasons and the new arrival date would be the middle of Feb, which was no good for us as we start our journey home to Wales on the 1st and had hoped for a week of ride-outs from Sydney to make sure all was good with bike and gear. We were given 24 hours to decide between the later arrival by boat or flying the bike at an additional cost of £1200! We didn’t have much choice but to agree to this and that’s where we are up to now. Our bike is still in the UK but we have a promised delivery date in Sydney of the 16th January – fingers crossed! To be fair to the shippers, they have now chipped in with free crating and help with arrival costs, which has helped. One other bit of news which makes us think that ‘every cloud has a silver lining’, is that the boat our bike should have been on has been held up in the Suez Canal, apparently due to the troubles in Israel! Sometimes you think that some things are just ‘meant to be’. So what's the message? You can plan all you like but things will inevitably change for reasons beyond your control, you just need to take these things in your stride and look for options. Full respect to all our influencers who have been there and done this, including: Charley & Ewan, Lavi & Ollie and Itchy Bootss, we just hope we can follow in their footsteps and complete (or even start!) our journey. Cheers Lobo & Linda
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