Today’s the day!

Wow. It’s time to go, almost. Today we fly to London and the Home of Ray and Ritta Fagain. Ritta has been an amazing help. We discovered that buying things from British companies and having them shipped to her house with an american credit card billing address is impossible. We have an ice maker, sleeping bags, mosquito nets and other wonderful items waiting for us to load into our little panda thanks to Ritta’s help!

We will have a few days in London to finish our shipping (still need a tent) and then it’s off to Southampton for the pre-launch camping and then off to Dover to take the ferry. I am pretty excited about seeing someone I haven’t seen since second grade in Brussels! Maybe first grade even… We reconnected on Facebook after my dad died last year July 8th. Weird how today is the anniversary, but he would have loved this entire enterprise and completely understood the need to undertake it. After emailing everyone about the trip the response I heard the most was “you are your father’s daughter”. Fitting then that this journey starts today.

I didn’t really have much expectations for the planning of this trip. Well, I expected it to not be as paperwork intensive as it was… but aside from that I didn’t expect to be part of a community or group. As it turned out an enormous percentage of the ralliers are on Facebook and we have had a group page going where we all discuss all kinds of logistics and hope and excitement and everything and anything that’s going through our dodgy little minds. That has been wonderful. We even got on the phone with a former rallier (2011) who this year is launching with the rest of us (all formers are invited to launches) but he and his team are driving a Subaru outfitted like a Jack Purcell, hence Shoebaru, to Capetown Africa.

We have to go get our last immunization now, signing off from the US…