First of the lasts...

good to get out of the way before we start with the last of the firsts :)

We've been away for a weekend visiting friends, so much talking about our plans. People's reactions tend to fall into roughly three groups:

1. The excited, delighted, positive & enthusiastic camp. Thankfully most of the people we have told have had this reaction. Plenty of 'I'm not surprised' and 'you've been leading up to something like that' and 'wow, what an excellent idea, you'll have such a great adventure'.
2. The slightly doubtful and concerned, hiding it in better or worse ways depending on how well we know them, asking lots of questions and looking like we're mad, but generally supportive even if discounting it with 'I couldn't do something like *that*'.
3. Outright against it. Thinking we should have our heads examined, wondering why on earth we'd want to do such a crazy thing, pushing lots of obstacles in our way, being voice of doom.

Maybe it's that we mix with people who are more like us in their way of thinking, or people know us well enough to think it will suit us even if they would hate the idea but we've only really had the very occassional third reaction from people. Sadly my Dad fall firmly into that camp. He is supportive, loving, has helped with lending us money for the van, will be storing our furniture, looking after the house for us and being the contact for tenants but has nothing good or positive to say about either the year long experience or the long term aims behind it. I understand his concerns, I appreciate his reasoning and worries are borne out of love for us and our wellbeing, safety and happiness is his priority, I just think he is misguided in some of his ideas and he thinks I am all but certifiable for most of mine!

Fortunately the people we spent the weekend with and visited while we were away are all very supportive and seem to understand our motivation for the coming years adventure. :-) We've also been very excited to find another Home Ed family about to embark on a similar WWOOFing adventure which at least puts us in not quite such a tiny minority ;).

So first of the lasts then... we're edging towards handing in our notice at work, giving notice to stop Sky tv, BT landline, broadband access etc. We've finally had a tenant view our house, no news yet as to whether they want to rent it but at least someone has now looked at it! We have a TO LET board up outside and everyone who needed to be told about our plans has now been informed. We're getting lots of 'before you go...' type things being said to us, my work is certainly winding down with me showing colleagues how to certain things I do ready for when I've gone. We could have as little as 3 weeks left in our house so this weekend will be spent clearing the garden and garage, Willow is having another looking at by a mechanic to ensure she is ready to go and will be MOTd just before we go and we'll be starting to box things up in the next few days ready to go into storage.

I've made contact with hosts right up to the end of July, we've decided to take some time off in August and I'm about to start contacting the Zone 3 hosts to book September, October and November. I've not had any luck finding suppliers who want to send us waterproofs, work boots or solar panels yet but I'll carry on in the hopes that someone would like a really good roadtesting of their products done for them :).