6 days to go: Preparations in full swing

6 days to go: Preparations in full swing, originally uploaded by Steve Rutherford.

Things are well underway now.. Reena has a bike that fits her, my bike is pretty much ok and the flat has lots of piles of stuff everywhere.

In an attempt to make our lives easier, I bought a little laptop that isn't too heavy ( eeepc 901: 1kg) and should allow us to:

• Plan and upload routes to the gps
• Check e-mail
• Watch movies and listen to music
• Use Skype to video conference with friends/family
  
• Edit photos and video
  

That's the theory anyway although clearly we need to find wifi cafes (/mcdonalds) in order to do some of the above.

Other than getting the technology sorted out we are now at the point where we just need to try to pack the huge piles of stuff into 4 small panniers and then decide what isn't actually that essential (and despite the results of the poll on the blog, the cashmere bedsocks are still looking superfluous to me!)

Take care, more soon.

A fit of maturity.

The bike debacle may be coming to an end (he said optimistically). We grumpily returned Reena's new bike to the shop yesterday morning and, after a degree of shouting and some well-timed hysterics from Reena, they offered to:

• Refund £250 for the paint job we didn't want
• Replace the gears with more appropriate touring gear ratios
• Adjust the handlebar stem and seat positioning so that it fits her "perfectly"
  

Our initial thoughts were to stomp off and call a solicitor on Monday demanding that these fools be forced by the courts to give us a refund but then I thought 'what are we trying to achieve ultimately?' Ultimately we want Reena to have a nice bike that fits her and that she can use for the next 10-15 years. If they can adjust the bike so that it fits her properly then, leaving aside the dreadful customer service and 9 month wait for delivery, this bike is probably about the best we can come up with. It's light, fast, beautifully made and allows her to carry small amounts of luggage on a rack on the back. In essence, it's exactly what we wanted (provided it fits.)

If they adjust it and it still doesn't fit then...

Bike traumas

After a 9 month wait we took delivery of Reena's new made to measure bicycle last Saturday only to find that the (particularly useless) bike shop hadn't really listened to any of our requirements - the bike paint scheme is wrong, Reena's name isn't painted on the side as agreed and, even if you could live with these two issues, it doesn't fit her very well. They were closed yesterday but I should be getting a phone call today in response to a fairly terse e-mail that I sent on Sunday asking for a refund.

With 3 weeks or so to go this leaves us with a little bit of a problem as her current bike isn't in any state to be used for the trip - the brakes are hopeless, the gears slip and need to be adjusted all the time. Not ideal if your route takes you up or down any hills which I suspect ours might.

Finding a small women-specific bikes that can be fitted with a rack is pretty much impossible and so options now are centered around building a new bike around either her existing frame or a new off the peg frame that I found on the internet. In a way this will be fun - I haven't built a bike before - but at the same time it has added some unnecessary stress to the pre-trip build up.

London to Istanbul: The proposed route

This map shows the proposed route by bicycle from London to Istanbul for me and Mrs R. It's probably 3000 miles to Istanbul and we have 6 months to do it. If we cycle every day then we would need to do 17 miles per day to make it - that's 3 miles less that our daily commute so not particularly traumatic. That said, we won't cycle every day, we may not stay for 6 months and, in fact, we may not end up in Istanbul at all.

We've decided not to go via Calais in order to skip the frozen north of France but (according to R) this isn't cheating as we are going to do more miles as a result. If it's still too cold then we'll take a train to somewhere warmer still.

The ferry to Bilbao is now booked for 4th February and so we're definitely going. Should certainly be an antidote to the credit crunch.