It
has been a mission getting from there to here from the moment Amanda said she’d
had enough of the joys of London to today. Including having our original
motorhome written off in January 2013, a leaky house that required extensive
damp and remedial works before we could sell it (this if you look back through
the blog this was a one of number of nasty surprises 2012 early 2013 had for us),
a damp and leaky motorhome ...that’s the one that got written off in January
this year that had to be repaired and renovated in 2012, before we could even
fully contemplate this trip ... which made the writing somewhat more painful,
for all the time money and effort put in.
There
has been depression, counselling, tiffs, spats, Conjunctivitis, Chest infections,
work stress, hundreds of hours of overtime, evenings and weekends of “fettling”
the original motorhome, keeping secrets from employers, dealing with the police
(ongoing), insurers (technically ongoing), selling a house and moving into my
brothers flat, unexpected and irretrievable expenses, purchase and conversion
of a new wagon, and to ice the cake a suspected broken wrist.
However
when all is said and done, we are here, we have both finished work. As of today
Saturday 24th September 2013 we don’t have jobs. We had a brilliant
week of au revoir’s then one big night of drinks and goodbyes (the management
reserves the right not to publish embarrassing pictures of the narrator and the
management being shit faced amongst a crowd of City of London teeny boppers on
a Friday night) ... oh the shame.
Our
old jobs and lives are history, our multi strand umbilical is slowly dropping
all its connections ... I pictured the Saturn V rockets dropping their coolant
and electrical feeds as I thought of these words. We aren’t off the launch pad
yet have, but there is an imminence to lift off that is inescapable. The other
visualisation is that of buying a new home off plans and then having to wait
while it’s built before you move in ... pick the analogy you prefer.
We
have a home to return to eventually and a houseful of stuff (technically we
don’t have a home for three months whatever happens). But right now, our
primary financial feeds are cut, we don’t have jobs. 95% of everything we own
or used in our previous lives is in a full size military green shipping
container in the middle of nowhere Essex. We are on a block of cash that we
need to eke out as best we can for as long as possible, and to supplement if at
all possible with work we can get as we travel (fruit picking, bar work,
campsite shit picker upper ... whatever). Underlying this is the rental income
from our eventual home, though at today’s prices, that money would only just
get us home.
This
afternoon as I sit and type, mildly (but doubly) hung over from pre-leaving
drinks leaving drinks, followed by proper leaving drinks, what we’ve done
weighs heavy with doubt and excitement.
Our life in this temporary home is still relatively expensive and would chew
through our limited funds like Pacman. We need to downsize into our wagon. We
need to complete the items on the list in the earlier post, we need to complete
the circuit, severe the final cords and begin the shakedown, before following
the sun south ... hopefully as a far as Cyprus.
It
doesn't feel brave, I think because we have a home to return to, no desire to
be doing what we are doing now, and the horrible realisation that if we wait
until we retire, we'll both be too fucked to do it anyway. We'll be here, on
the blog, Facebook and twitter. We hope that people can get a blow by blow account
as we go, so the experience is in some ways shared, and we hope some of our
nearest and dearest can drop by as we go and meet us on the way and share some
real bits with us.
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