05.16.09

The Week in London

Posted in Short trip in Old Blighty, The journey journal at 4:11 pm by Administrator

So tomorrow is the big send off and the beginning of the adventure. Geez its getting exciting. We managed to pack everything into the panniers and it actually fit. Nic has been spending a bit of time making sure that our bikes are set up correctly and that our kit fits well. The few hundred bucks for her to do the course on setting up the bikes was so worth it. My achilles has been giving me so much trouble the last few days but between the setting of the gear and the acupuncture its really improving. Yay for Nic.
This week in London has been really fun. Cruising around london on the bikes and doing loads of sight seeing. I’ve been revisiting some old haunts and trying to be a decent tour guide for Nic. The problem is that I keep forgetting important landmarks are there until we’re halfway through wizzing past them and then I flail wildly trying to get nic to look at them. I’m hoping that we haven’t missed too much important stuff. Catching up with quite a few of the crew that are here in London has been great and last night at the Crabtree pub was awesome to see some many familiar faces so far from home. The ride home from the pub was interesting after a few beverages. We managed to do a small pub crawl of some old london establishments before getting to the meeting. I had to get Nic to try some of the warm flat beers that I grew to like while I was living here and she had to see the Maple leaf pub to get a taste of home.
Its been also a bit weird for me to be back in London and I’ve kinda been looking at it through rose coloured glasses the last week. Only seeing the good stuff that I used to do and avoiding the stuff that drove me away. I still love the achetecture of this amazing, animal of a city and I’ve been trying to stick to the edict of only looking up when I’m tourinig the city. Looking up makes London such an interesting place as you can have several thousand years worth of stories right there in each of the buildings that you pass. It will be cool to get on the road tomorrow though and see if all of this planning was any good and if we’ll be suited to the ride and keeping it going.
Also from this week is the fun story of the Azerbiajani embassy. We had prepared all of our paperwork a few months ago for that visa and had it all sorted for when we got here to London. So after a bit of fun navigation through Kennsington we found the consulate in a basement. We walked in and a well to do diplomat asked if he could help. I said that he could and pulled out all of our paperwork. He took one look and said that it wasn’t any good and he couldn’t help us. I knew that the paper work was good and so questioned a little. It turns out that the paperwork was good until 4 weeks ago when the foreign ministry of AZ made a snap decision to change their whole system. Thanks guys. The diplomat also said that the only way that I’d be able to get a visa was to go to the embassy in my home country. Australia doesn’t have an AZ embassy so he helpfully pointed out that I should be able to get my visa if I went to Jakarta. Woohoo. Holiday to indo. Well actually after I did some deep questioning of the guy and his country’s wonderful system I found out that I could actually get some people in Baku to have the papers forwarded to Istanbul and we could pick up the visa there. Thanks for nothing mister diplomat. Anyway a few emails and another 50 US dollars I have got the paperwork sorted again and now it turns out that we’ll have to spend 2 weeks in Istanbul waiting for visas rather than the one that I’d planned but I can think of loads worse places to spend 2 weeks than Istanbul.
Tonight we are meeting Jenn at Heathrow airport so that she can join us for the first leg of teh journey to Paris. It’ll be great to share the initial part with a good friend and she will be our first guinea pig on how others joining the ride will be able to put up with us. Hopefully we can set her gear up and get her un-jetlagged by the morning as being slightly crazy and having only standard northamerican amounts of holiday time she is cutting the timing of the journey really fine. 1 night in London before leaving and then 1 in Paris at the end. Good luck getting back to work Jenn.
Anyway its time to go for now and go enjoy the last of london before we start living out of our panniers but hopefully I’ll be able to update this regularly.
Hugs to all
Trent

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