Updates - 8 weeks to go!

Eight weeks to go exactly, what a blast! So here's what's been happening:

The current status of our fundraising efforts: £1709.06, yipee!

We have been shopping and spending money like crazy but managed to secure some really good and useful stuff like insect repellents (DEET 100%!!! - quite scary really, the list of precautions and storage instructions is longer than its actual usefulness), balaclavas (can't wait to take a pic wearing it!), wet wipes (Johnson's baby rocks!), Imodium tablets (lots of them...), some sting & bite creams, more baselayers (Paul) and undergloves (Darina). Our visas arrived on Thursday too, the insurance is sorted and I've had my yellow fever vaccination today! Happy days!

We made a little trip to Lickey Hills to do some more walking as well. We have chosen the Woodpecker trail which was supposed to be 7miles long (the others were only about mile or so long) - the only thing expected from us was to follow the red arrow. How difficult could that be??? Oh well...

At the beginning it was quite easy as the red arrows were stuck to wooden poles along the path every hundred or so meters. During this time Paul has discovered that when his Camelbak is full of stuff, the shoulder straps get a bit tight so it is actually a good idea to use their "adjustable" property and adjust them so he could walk normally again and also the trousers won't be as loose if he clips on the belt... We learn something new every day, right :-)?

Then we sort of lost track of the red arrows (please translate to: he wanted to go to the left, I wanted to go to the right... I was - of course - right) so we improvised and followed an unmarked path that eventually after some mild descends through a forest led us back to the main path and we re-discovered red arrows route. That worked well for a few more meters until I made a mistake and forced us to go in a direction which kind of looked ok to me even though Paul was sure it wasn't the right one. Never mind. We women must sometime let the men think that they are the ones who actually know what's going on ;-)

In any case... we haven't found the seven mile route and we doubt that you can even find seven miles in the Lickey Hills country park as we kept coming back to one place (the car park & visitors' centre). We were supposed to go over 4 hills on this route but I am not sure we actually found any hills at all. This could be a question of personal perception of a hill though. The walk was nevertheless pleasant and we clocked in some more miles towards our Kili preparations.

The email from ATR (our travel agency) came through this morning, asking for paying the balance so we are now expecting their response regarding how many pounds they will want from us and after then it's all done and sealed and there is no turning back!!!