3-weeks-and-an-ipad

First blog post from the iPad which I will be using for updates for the first 2 or 3 weeks of our trip until I lose it or it gets stolen. Reassuring to see the features that allow me to lock or even wipe it remotely. Waiting for the app that would allow me to watch a potential thief’s face as the iPad develops a case of extreme tourettes at the most inopportune moments. Anyone out there keen to develop? I will give you both the rights to it, and a starter set of words to be getting on with. But I digress…

Three weeks today, we leave. 19 sets of flights booked, and 117 of the 185 nights’ accommodation. With 4 young kids, we decided to try to get as much booked in advance as we could. It would have been cheaper, and probably more fulfilling, to make some of those decisions as we went, but the stress of not knowing where they would be sleeping was one we decided we didn’t want to add to our rapidly growing list of things to freak us out. So we still need to find places to stay in Bolivia, part of Costa Rica and most of Argentina.

Over here, we are packing and shifting to storage on a weekly basis, trying to motivate the estate agents to find us non-homicidal tenants for the house, finalising details with school, recovering from the hit of upfront costs, trying to fit in a London to Paris cycle while fat and unfit for a children’s project in Gaza (still open for sponsorship), arranging charity and personal affairs for while we’re gone, still hoping to have a goodbye day, and enough more on this list to accelerate a boredom-induced coma. For anyone in need of developing vicarious OCD, I will put out the full list one day.

Today, some packing, lost passports, Cuban visa, and Doctor’s appointment. There are some ailments one is better not having during a trip. We are fortunately at a stage where if one of those conditions was pregnancy, number 5 wouldn’t be born atop a volcano in southern Argentina. Though I think Ash AlQasem would be a pretty cute name. With that, enough prattle, and back to preparations.

P.S. If anyone from my old team is reading this, thank you so much for the iPad leaving gift. It is a wonderful thing that I will enjoy for a few weeks before it gets forcibly shared with someone else.