And so it Begins...
First of all, welcome everyone who has cared to visit Saddle2Summit. I, for one; have put in some hours to create this website, so I hope a few of you have a brief look around.
Plan
So where do I start – I suppose an overview of the plan is in order. I want to try and keep this short and sweet (and it will be) because at the moment my plan is rather minimal. A general overview is as follows:
Arrive into Tbilisi, Georgia with a bike (hopefully, the girl, Ingrid) - Green spot
Cycle to Budapest for brother’s stag-do in September - Orange spot
Cycle to UK for brother’s wedding in October - Red spot
Cycle around Africa and help with the community
Cycle indefinitely until bored/meet love of life/find somewhere I want to settle/realise I am being a bum and get a ‘real’ job.
Die a happy man
So that’s the plan and it will probably take in the region of 3-5 years to complete steps 1-4, and 5-6 not sure. What actually comes in between points 1-6, well nobody knows.
Route
I quickly sketched up a route (in 2 minutes) for the following year, but if you’re interested in more detail, drop me a note and I will have a better think.
Additional Plan
The original plan was to climb the highest mountains in each country; however, because of my complete incompetence to plan anything I have found that this will be close to impossible through the winter. And coming to think of it, as I sit here writing this blog post, snow is falling outside (at Tbilisi 500m altitude) and roads are impassable even to the start of even the 3rd tallest mountain. Looks like I will have to have a rethink on that one.
Getting to airport and Tbilisi
As a few of you are familiar with now. The standard cowering to Dad with tail between legs happened. And because he’s such a great Dad he ‘happily obliged’ to take me to airport a mere 2 days before departure.
Of course because of the nature of us ‘Whitlam family’ we preceded to park up a princely distance of 1.5 miles and carry all my worldly possessions to avoid a £7 parking ticket. By the time we got to the airport a mere 45minutes later, we were pooped.
Flight was smooth and I arrived at Georgia at 1.30am and had a little kip under some stairs to get me used to what was to come – surprisingly I slept like a baby.
