T minus 2 months

With eight weeks to go till kick off, I'm going to make this pretty much my first travel related post.

Over the past week I've really knuckled down on the planning, all aspects, destinations, visas, vaccinations, finance, the works, culminating in a very pleasant hour and a half in the travel agents on Saturday.

I really, think we're getting somewhere and I'd suspect I'll probably have my flights all booked by the end of the week.

Things to do:

- Pick a city in Southeast United States to fly into from Venezuela. Current thinkin': Nashville.

- Decide what I'm doing in Australasia. Either way, I'm coming out of Sydney bound for Chile in the 3rd week of March.

- Vaccinations: Decide how sick I want to be for the next eight weeks and what diseases I'm going to try and *avoid*.

- Visas: Will the Travel Agent sort out the Australian ETA? Will I have to write to the Venezuelan embassy?

- Finance: To be arranged. But pretty much all under control.

- Travel Insurance: Pay the Tax de sejour and organise this.

- Gear: Get down to the hiking shop with Big Dave and start looking at the gore-tex.

The only country out of sequence weather wise is the Czech Republic. Everywhere else, should be seasonally hot or at least thawing by the time I make it to Anchorage and woollens should be cheap enough up there.

I'll pick this up later again probably.