What happened yesterday

I worked in the morning – Ady took Davies and Scarlett off with him so I was home alone for an hour or so, always a slightly strange situation given how infrequently it happens. Ady had picked me up an ipod shuffle (*tiny* little thing) for £15 in one of the supermarket staff shops so I was battling with installing itunes and then battling with getting all the songs off an external hard drive back onto the laptop via itunes which needed to convert them all. It has worked but it seemed to be taking real time of each song to do :rolls: And I can’t work out how to get songs back off it again so it now has every piece of music from the hard drive including a load of sci-fi sound effects (used for Doctor Who party) and a load of classical music. Which is likely to prove quite annoying when listening to it and getting Daleks saying ‘EXTERMINATE!’ in the middle of my Amy Winehouse songs 😆

I enjoyed my morning at work – saw F, who I’ve not seen for ages as I was on holiday and then she was, so we had plenty to catch up on. And the Lucy came in so I had a chat with her while R&R chose books and joined the summer reading game. It was a busy morning too with a big delivery, storytime and loads of borrowers coming in so the time just flew – the days I get fed up there are the slow ones.

Back home at 1pm the others had already got home and eaten lunch. They’d had a good morning visiting stores and also popped into a charity shop. They had bought a HP dvd which was one they’d not already got and had a second disc full of extras so that was the afternoon taken care of for D&S. I let the fact we’re supposed to be not spending and getting rid of stuff rather than acquiring more go – it was only 2 quid and we will be taking some dvds with us.

All of which left me free to finish going through all the hosts that will accept children – there are 198, narrow down all who sound suitable for us and plot them all on a big map. The narrowing down process clearly hasn’t been strict enough though as we have 114 plotted on our map. We discounted hosts only when one of us vetoed them – usually for something like ‘we like to celebrate the turning of the earth and her moon phases and seasons by dancing around the fire’ – Ady. ‘We value all life and live on raw food only, a fully vegan diet with no caffeine, alcohol or cigarettes’ – Nic. Basically anyone we deemed potential weirdos 😆 😆 We’ve tried to get a good mix of large and small operations, some fruit and veg, lots of animals, some organic. We have got remote crofters on Scottish isles, people who are being self sufficient, people who sell their produce, people who are living off grid, several intentional communities, a handful of Home Educators, some who are all but city dwellers, vineyards, beekeepers, cattle, dairy, sheep farmers, those who grow herbs to make medicines, those who keep sheep for their wool and spin and dye and knit woollen garments for a living.

We will clearly need to hone the list now as we have three times as many hosts as we need for our year. I’m sure there will be a sort of natural selection process whereby we won’t suit what they are looking for or they won’t be open for WOOFers at the time of year we will be in their location. But I suspect we will do an initial cull as our next step to bring the numbers down a little to maybe double what we need.

Our next step therefore is writing out the months of our year away and picking 3-5 for each month working our way around the country. We have some things we want to do at certain times including my own personal wish list of seeing the northern lights. I’ve been looking at various websites talking about sightseeing in the UK too and trying to find other things we’d like to make a point of doing as we go round. I’d quite like to see dolphins again so that might be a target for JUly / August next year, we’d like to see as many friends as possible on the way round, attend as many of the regular get togethers as we can so if we can be in the vicinity for parties in roughly the right time that would be good. I’d still like to do a Christmas camp in 2011 so if we could be near a right-sized youth hostel in early December that would make sense and I guess we’ll probably come home to my parents for Christmas. It looks like the sensible route would therefore be off to the left into Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, round and up to South Wales and North Wales, across to the east of Scotland, up into the highlands and islands, down via a hostel, back to the south for Christmas and then off to the east and midlands early 2012 in a sort of spiralling fashion. The biggest concentration of hosts is in that first chunk of the south west and Wales so I think we’ll need to go back through all the ones we’ve marked in that area and be more choosey with our selection.

We also need to write a biography type email about ourselves and get it sent to try and convince hosts to have us. Then start sending them off and coordinating responses.

So that was my afternoon 🙂 I also managed to write my first blogpost over on http://wondering-wanderers.blogspot.com/ which will be the public face record of the journey, complete with back story, planning the whole thing and what happened next. Still not entirely sure what I’m going to do with that but enough people have told me it’s a story worth telling and might even bring in some money but I need to work out how exactly. Tasha suggested listing all the various kit we’ll need for the year starting with the campervan and working downwards to gas, solar panel, working boots, good outdoor gear and a good supply of tinned goods and contacting companies to see if they want to sponsor us and supply them in exchange for plugs on the blog. Which seems reasonable but I’m conscious of making it relevant and not spamming readers :). I think I need to write a fair bit more and have a blog with a bit of proper content before I do anything else with it. I’ll also be getting some advice from Jax about ways of making money from your blog.

The kids had tea, while watching more HP and Ady got home. I read some ‘Why the whales came’ and the kids went to bed. Davies didn’t actually make it to bed as such as he is creating a huge marauders map but they were in bedrooms at least.