Things start getting difficult tomorrow, and becomes what I call the real start to the trip (even if we do have a tendency to think of Africa only!). It’s been a pretty easy 2 weeks getting used to travel in the place we live, now we have to see how campsites are advertised (the world camping list downloaded into the GPS will start to come in handy!), plus we have a different language to deal with – one neither of us knows! We’ll be away from the comforts of home and people to drop in on, so we have to be totally self-sufficient (OK, not 100% true as we are seeing a friend in Switzerland, but you get the point!). We won’t know where to find anything, whether food or bike parts or anything else needed, and it will all be rather confusing! At least we’ve done it before (Spain and Romania particularly), but not over the timespan or with the set-up we have now. Cross fingers it will go smoothly!!
We had a great time up on Hadrian’s Wall, had slightly better weather for the final days and got plenty of walking done plus saw a good chunk of the wall. We then headed back to Lichfield! We had to go to a motorbike store to get summer gloves for me, as well as go to a large camping store to restock – we figured it was easiest to go back where we knew, and it got us halfway to Exeter where we had friends to see for a night. After that, we had 4 days along the south coast in Dorset, a surprisingly wonderful part of the country. This area is known as the Jurassic Coast for the fantastic timeline of geology from one end to the other from Triassic to Jurassic to Cretaceous. We stayed 2 nights near Lyme Regis, a seaside resort town that is famous for its easily found fossils, mostly ammonites but also dinosaurs, around halfway along the coastline. We spent some time fossicking for our own fossils, finding a few ammonites and maybe a fossil bone! (couldn’t take them with us though). We walked across one section of rock that was covered in massive ammonites, some almost 2 feet wide! Unfortunately one night I found I had lost the 
ammonite I found the day we left home, which must have slipped out of my camera bag where I had moved it for “safe keeping”. I have to admit to feeling rather devastated by this, as I’m not religious but believe strongly in fate, and I had felt the ammonite discovery at that time was a really strong sign that everything would be OK for our trip. I’ve consoled myself by saying it’s gone back to where it came from, as we’ve found the same rocks in our driveway are on the beaches in Dorset, and that this is also a good sign. I’m still not entirely convinced however…We also got to see red rock stacks, reminiscent of the 12 Apostles on Australia’s Great Ocean Road, at the Triassic end of the coast, and white stacks made from chalk all the way down the Cretaceous end of the coastline. I won’t get to
see the White Cliffs of Dover before we go, but I got some very good white cliffs anyway! We also got to tick off another of the places to see on my list – the Cerne Abbas Giant, a massive chalk figure cut into the hillside complete with club and rather large appendage. Possibly a 17th or 18th century farce or maybe older, it’s still an impressive feat of construction. Dorset is a lot quieter than other areas in the UK, very rural, full of impossibly cute towns with thatched roofs and stone constructions, and had a very Tasmanian feel to it. We’ve travelled all over the UK, found cute places to live though felt it would be hard to decide where to go – both of us said Dorset would be a great place to live! A note to all those people who 
over the past 4 years who have said to me “what do you want to live in this country for?” – you have an amazing countryside and incredible history here, there’s so much to see and do, get out there and enjoy it!!!!!We headed further along the coast towards Brighton, where we spent a lovely couple of days with Xander’s aunt, uncle and family, who looked after us well and let us use their washing machine for our smelly clothes! I found leaving a bit difficult, as we’re on the track of saying our goodbyes, and leaving the UK is getting very close. We also don’t know when we’ll see people
again who we’ve seen easily over the last 4 years. Now we’re getting ready to leave Xander’s best friend, someone we’ve known from Tasmania, who has looked after us for a couple of days while we’ve littered his floor with all our stuff, trying to find ways to cull more things and pack better! It’s been good to stop for a while, slow down, sort out all our mail he’s been collecting, and catch up on a few things that we haven’t been able to deal with. We’re still not on top of everything, for instance I doubt we’ll get these blog entries uploaded before we hit the road, and we still haven’t set up photo-hosting so we can add some pics to the blog! I guess we’ll have to spend time not being tourists, catch up on things, and start spending money in internet cafes!
We’ve managed to stick to our £30 a day budget so far, but we’ve not had to pay to go see anything due to our wonderful English Heritage membership and not particularly wanting to enter anything that need paying for! Food has been easy enough to deal with, we’ve had a few splurges such as fish & chips on the beach and a seafood soup, but have kept it fairly simple. We’re running around a bit but are still only filling the tank every 3 days, although we are filling at a bit over 250 miles and it seems we can stretch that out further (roughly 23 litres out of the 36 litre tank). Camping has varied but is generally around £11 per night and have been fairly easy to find and quite nice. However, the biggest problem has been that we seem to attract large roudy family groups! As we’ve tried to stay for at least 2 nights in each campsite, we’ve found our lovely idyllic spots have become crowded with new arrivals on the second day, and they all want to camp near us!! The last site had FIVE families set up near us – yes, we moved!!! Camping in the UK is quite strange to us – people seem to want all the comforts of home, they bring the most enormous tents and create tall privacy barriers around them, and some of the sites can be so massive with people crammed into every spot (this includes campers, caravans and static caravans) while providing swimming pools, bars, restaurants, playgrounds, etc! Nothing like what we are used to, where camping is a way to get away from everything and sites can be pretty basic.
The trip itself is still not feeling entirely real, although that feeling is slowly changing. I’ve been talking about it all for so long, and I feel I answer questions on auto-pilot, that’s it’s not really me speaking and that I’m not really doing this trip. In fact, I wonder sometimes if people are simply thinking it’s all a pipe-dream and not actually going to take place!! So many people have been saying “so you must be really excited then?!” but to be honest, it’s been difficult to get excited when there was so much to sort out with the house, and now I just feel like I’m being a tourist at home. But the closer we come to leaving the UK, the more real it’s becoming. I’m already past the feeling that I have to return to work – several weeks packing the house helped that! But I’m not yet feeling that there is no end to the trip, that we will be going where we want to go, when we want, and taking as long to do it as we wish – an amazingly bizarre concept I have to say!