Training Begins.....

We've done a lot of research in to suitable training for Kilimanjaro, obviously when we are spending so much money and travelling so far you want to give yourself the best chance of being succesful, however I have not read anyones comments saying that they just got too tired of walking and decided to just sit down and give up (don't know what actually happens if you do this, do they jsut abadon you on the mountain?) , the only reason anyone ever fails to make it to the top is through altitiude sickness which we can't train for.

Anyway as per everyone else that seems to do Kilimanjaro we decided we needed to do more walking to prepare, also as I have not camped out anywhere since I was about 12 years old and that was in a freinds small back garden in West Bromwich and not on a big mountain (let's face it there are far more dangers in West Bromwich......) I could also do with some practise sleeping in a tent. We arranged to do a trip to Wales where some friends live, the plan was to spend the weekend trekking and sleep in the tent on the two nights.

I bought the tent a few months ago withe the intention of spending more time camping in preperation for Kilimanjaro, in actuality I removed the tent from the bag once and tried briefly to erect it in the house before realising there wasn't enough space and I packed it back away and didn't unpack it again until today. I chose the tent as it was suitable for backpacking as it packed away to a very small budle, weighed under 3kg and was quick and easy to assemble. Still we decided that the best thing to do when we arrived was to build the tent first as we had no idea how long it would take.

The tent assembly was actually really simple, if we weren't camping in a garden we may have been short of a hammer to put the pegs in but other than this we built the tent in around 20 minutes and didn't experience any problems (with the tent) all weekend.

Our home for 2 days

With the tent completed we went for our first trek of the weekend. Will and Kate (our hosts) went with us part of the way and provided us with a map to work out where we were and where we were going, unfortunately between us our map reading skills left a lot to be desired and we ended up walking up a track that must have been maded by sheep rather than an official walking path. This seemed to be a common theme for the weekend with us also wandering through some woods on a steep hill trying to find an exit from a field and also getting sent back from a field by a farmer on a tractor for walking on his property. Luckily on Kilimanjaro we will have a guide who hopefully knows the way!

Extreme close up of Darina, with the fields of Llangollen in the background......

The kit we have so far was very good though, I think I am going to stick with the boots that I have despite them beign a bit low and teh trousers I recently purchased were fantastic including side pockets the perfect size for my phone and camera, all this and they zip off to make shorts and even have colour coded zips so even I can't try to put the legs on the worng way around!

Me and my trousers (That is just an unfortunate crumple on my t-shirt and not my belly, honestly......)

We  have also sorted out the insurance for trekking now with a company called Dogtag, not only do they give us a set of gimmicky dog tags to wear with our name, insurance policy number and a contact telephone but they were also the cheapest we found (although I did stop looking when I saw the gimmick).

The holiday balance is due imminently so it really is no turning back now, the fund raising is also going very well with one of our suppliers sponsoring us £1200 which is absolutely fantastic. Louise is also looking to organise a party for a couple of weeks before we go to help raise some more money.

So that is the latest status of how we are progressing, I went to Go Outdoors yesterday to take advantage of their 15% off sale and buy some more trousers (pretty much the same but in grey instead of green) another fleece, a base layer and a buff headwear which will hopefully be enough to keep the sun off me as I really don't want to wear a hat! I still have to sort out my vaccinations for Yellow Fever and something else that I can't remember but is written down somewhere, I do however have my Malaria tablets that I must have had from something else as I found them while doing a clear out of my medicine cabinet (I actually had some medicine that expired in 1997 in there!) so hopefully I won't end up like Cheryl Cole.

Just need to update my kit list now to find out how many more things I still have to get.........