So, that's it then. I finished work today - not without a few last minute panics - and now I am free. It is now at least nine months till I have to go into an office again. And since I am having serious doubts about the course of my career, perhaps the last time ever I go into an office.

The day started well - we met eight friends in a pub near work for a champagne breakfast (full English, croissants and the all important Veuve Cliquot). After being forced to demo an extremely trivial aspect of Weblogic I got my final timesheet signed and was straight out the door. Stuart, Shane and I spent the afternoon drinking champagne around the City. Unfortunately, Shane and I were prohibited from ice-skating because we seemed to be the worse for wear...

And now, for me, just the journey. I paid the last part of the tickets today. I'll go and get them in two days. I have to say, I'm feeling very scared about the journey. I think that we underestimate the magnitude of what we are attempting - there was a huge ten foot tall map in Trailfinders, and we kept making multifeet journeys!

It's not as if we are great explorers - we're not Cook, or the Viking who got to America - but this is still bigger and more dangerous than anything we have done ine the past. And I am beginning to realise this.

Time is passing really quickly now. I am wondering if we are really going to do this thing. We paid for the tickets on Thursday so I suppose we are. It is just so very alien to us and the way we are. I am posting this blog late at night so have been sitting around contemplating for a while and feeling a bit anxious (I am quite an anxious person anyway). I do have visions of getting to the check in and just not being able to hand over the luggage. We usually have everything planned out. Also being away for so long will seem strange.

Steve finishes work on Tuesday, which is one of the things that makes me realise how quickly departure day is approaching. On the other (positive!) side I listen to music at work quite a lot and sometimes a really upbeat song is played which makes me feel adventurous and eager to depart. If someone had told me a year ago that I would be leaving on a long journey with only two nights accommodation arranged I would have laughed. Not that I'm having any last minute change of heart feelings........

Re the sea-sickness, I think Linda doesn't appreciate the scale of the danger. When you find the captain in his cabin, lying on a bed, with a blanket over his head, and when he says "wake me up when this is all over", then you're entitled to feel a little nervous ...

Anyway - it is now likely that my brother will meet us in Santiago, Chile. This is great news - not only because it would be good to see him, but also because he can take our cold weather stuff away and bring some warm weather clothes. In addition, he can bring books! This is a major concern for us.

When we went to Cuba last year, we were in the hotel for about 8 days. In that time, Linda read 16 books.

Now, we have to carry everything ... and so we are worried about the weight etc etc. So we are purchasing books based on density. At the moment, we are only taking two books to South America: "War and Peace" - 1400+ pages and the complete works of Shakespeare (almost 1500 pages and small print). I have a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" which I've been meaning to read for ages - but at only 1230 pages it might be pricking on the plain for a while....

Regarding the sea sickness mentioned in Steve's post. The post reminds me of a story Steve and his brother are fond of telling when discussing holidays past. It is about a time when they were in Spain and were invited by some Spanish fisherman for a day out on their trawler. Steve recalls it as a near death experience and says that he has never been as sick in his life as he was that day.

It seems that the hair colouring has been a success - two weeks and still no visible roots. Time seems to be going very quickly now and the trip does not seem that far away. Suddenly all those things that we kept thinking we would get around to sorting out some time later need to be done very soon. I worked out on Friday night that I only have 32 working days left to go! The notion of not getting up in the morning to go to work is alien (and, I have to confess, a little scary) for me. I need to learn to chill out a little more and just go with the flow. I was calculating this whilst in a floatation tank. As a side comment I highly recommend floating as a form of relaxation. It is not so much the floating itself that is relaxing but the feeling that you get afterwards is great. If it relaxes me (and I am a very anxiety ridden person) then it should work for most people. Also does wonders for anyone with a bad back. Check out Floatworks if you are interested.

We are now trying to plan the South American itinerary in much greater detail than we had previously. Steve has spent hours reading up and comparing activities. The internet has been a fabulous resource. I wonder how people managed pre-internet. It has been invaluable for finding info on countries, hotels, activities, tours, health issues, other travellers' experiences and opinions and more importantly, shopping!

I have also been trying to get to grips with Latin American Spanish. Having studied Italian previously has given me a bit of a head start and (in my opinion) it is certainly easier than trying to learn German.

We are not impetuous travellers - in fact, more planning has gone in to this holiday than some of the early Gemini missions. Certainly more technology has been used.

We now have a spreadsheet set up with columns for location and days spent at the place. It then calculates the elapsed days, date of arrival at a place and the amount of money we will have spent up to that point. So for example, in the latest plan we arrive at Arequipa (Peru) on 18/02/2002 on day 29. This, of course, is nonsense - since there's so many assumptions (that it won't take very long to find a Galapagos tour) that we simply can't prove. Still, it keeps us off street corners.

I've revised the Peru itinerary to make it more of a continuous tour rather than the spike-and-hub topology it had before. Now it looks like this:

1. Arrive Quito (day 1). Spend a few days adjusting to the altitude and (nervously) looking around the old city.Try to book a trip to the Galapagos Islands.
2. Cruise the Galapagos (arriving day 4). Be amazed by the fauna and how much Linda can be sea-sick.
3. Day 12, stop at Guayquil (the plane back to Quito stops here and we thought we might as well hop out and explore a different - and hopefully safer - city).
4. Fly to Lima on day 15. Gasp at the high altitude, explore the old city and drop in at the South American Explorers office for help on planning the rest of the Peru leg.
5. New stage: on day 20 we will fly to Arequipa - this looks like an interesting place to see as well as being surrounded by some great hikes. After a few days acclimatization, we plan to try to walk through the Colca Canyon (the second deepest in the world - about twice the depths of the Grand Canyon).
6. Day 29 - fly to Cuzco.This is the beginning of the high point of the Peru leg for both of us. We'll spend a few days looking around the city and then
7. Take the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu "the most amazing urban creation of the Inca Empire" (day 33)
8. After returning to Cuzco, we're planning on going into the jungle (on day 41) at Manu I hope we can stay with Manu Nature Tours because the website makes them look great, but it would complete bust our bugetary limits.
9. We're flown back to Cuzco and on day 50 catch the train to Puno which is on Lake Titicaca. We'll spend a few days (and perhaps a night) on the islands of the highest navigable lake in the world (3800 metres).
10. On day 54, we'll catch the bus that goes to La Paz.

That's as far as the detailed planning goes at the moment. I'll update the site when Boliva and Chile (including Easter Island) are mapped out.

It is now only eight weeks this coming Tuesday till we set off on our voyages. We went to visit my parents this weekend and they have a map up on the wall with our route drawn on - it's strange to see it laid out, some parts seem a lot longer (the route across the Pacific) while some appear shorter (the South American part). Mum tried to talk us out of cycling down the "most dangerous road in the world" and Linda wavered briefly. But the plan stays.

Purchasing and provisioning has gone ahead - our tent turned up last week. (Bought from cheap tents - highly recommended). It's amazing how far camping technology has progressed since I was last in a tent.