Where to start. We're currently on the plane from Australia to South Africa. High above the Indian Ocean. It's 10pm, or something in my timezone - who knows what it is on the ground / ocean.

So, if we haven't started, we've got to be close.

We could easily have started eight weeks ago, with our last days at work. Or three months before that when we decided to do this again. 

We've done this before - head off on a multi-month holiday / trip / cycle tour. Steve has done indefinite length trips (two) that both ended up being about a year on the bike. Cath hasn't yet. Cath wanted to. So after months and months of talking, trying to work out what we wanted, we've decided to quit our jobs and go do it again. Well, Steve has quit, Cath is hedging her bets with a one year leave of absence. That will likely end up being longer - we'll see.

The next challenge is where to go. Since we spent so much time deliberating on whether to go, and then aiming to give our employers ample notice, we managed to end up with a plan to actually start in October. So the northern hemisphere is out (we didn't want to start heading into winter). The southern hemisphere is clearly a better choice. We've seen big chunks of South America before on other trips, and Australia is not a big enough change of scenery. That left Africa. The big continent that we both were desperate to get to when we were younger. Now that we're a bit older the potential hazards of spending time in Africa make it seem scarier than the relatively sheltered life we've had in Australia. And of course, our friends both don't want us to go because they think the place is even more dangerous than their imaginations.

So we picked Africa. And a route through Africa that is well trodden by tourists. Basically, the reverse of the euro-centric Cairo to Cape Town with a bit extra thrown in. We're flying from Australia to Johannesburg. We didn't really want to start in Johannesburg (security, etcetera), so we're taking a domestic flight from J'burg to Port Elizabeth. We'll start cycling in PE, ride the Garden Route to Cape Town, then north to Namibia, then east and north through Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania to Kenya. Unfortunately, the wars in South Sudan and Ethiopia and challenges of travelling in Somalia might mean we can't get to Cairo. We'll likely need to fly over those parts. This is such a well-trodden route, that we know a couple of guys from Adelaide (who also Rogaine!) who have ridden trikes on this route.

We don't have much more of a plan for Africa than that. We roughly expect this to take 6 months (no, we're not going very fast). There will be some detours and stops along the way. We also want to be away for at least a year. Unless we get lost in Africa, there will need to be a second continent. Luckily 6 months’ time from now is spring in the northern hemisphere and there are lots of options there. Northern Canada and the Dempster (or is it Dalton?) Highway is high on the list.

The house is a challenge when travelling. We needed to get a property manager - who made it easy to find a tenant to look after the house and this will pay some of the bills while we're away. Then there were the little jobs that we'd been putting up with for almost a decade that we felt needed to be done before we left it. It's completely amazing that we've spent the best part of 2 months working - flat out - getting ourselves and the house ready to leave. We have pushed out the departure date by a couple of weeks from the initial plan just to get everything on the list checked off. Now that I look back on it, there was a bonus week of work, a week visiting relatives. Still, 6 weeks seems like such a long time to just pack up and leave a house. We have done a lot of the little (and big) jobs around the place, and we've completed everything on the list. Couldn't have done it without weeks of work from my brother Tim, and both of our mothers helped a lot with the cleaning. Owning a house doesn't mesh well with long distance cycle touring – but maybe we just did it wrong.

It was such a whirlwind the last few days / weeks, I hope we haven't forgotten anything.

We're at least on the way now. And with any luck we can start to focus on riding very shortly.