Those were very wise words that were spoken to me many, many years ago in my first class of a woodwork course. They are very true, but now I would like to add my own wisdom to these words as I discovered it is even more important to know what size you need to measure before you can start measuring… Thinking you know how big a piece of wood needs to be and measuring that size and checking before you cut it doesn’t help if it needs to be a different size!

Luckily we had enough spare wood to make up for these beginner errors (you’d think we were experts by now after already successfully making other boxes for Lara!) and we are now finalising the last 3 storage boxes. We’ll see how far I get today, but they need to be finished (painted and all) by tomorrow evening latest. A huge challenge, but we have decided to pack the car this weekend as we have no other weekends left before Lara is loaded into the container that will take her to Kuala Lumpur. Well, not exactly true. We would have another weekend, but we decided to use that weekend to ride in the Tour Down Under Community Challenge and catch up with friends in Adelaide instead. So packing this weekend it is. We’ll let you know how that went, but just in case I have added a big panic button here. You never know if we need it after the weekend.

At the moment we think we are in good shape (unfortunately not physical fitness shape which means we’ll struggle on the Tour Down Under ride), but we had a pretty successful week in terms of preparing Lara for her imminent departure.

Yesterday Jon picked up the aluminium roof box we had made and it is perfect. As you can see Jon fits in it very comfortably so all we need to do is add a bit a foam as a mattress and his bed is ready too.

Jon’s bed

sleeping arrangements from a different angle

painting the shoe racks

We now also have:

• most of our spares, including some sump washers sent to us for free by a fellow Defender owner (thanks Hamish!)
• a GPS – to ensure we don’t kill each other
• tie down straps – for in the container
• a shovel – so Jon can dig us out of trouble
• shoe racks – an awesome job done by Davies Sheet Metal in Milton (they did all our aluminium work and have done a fantastic job)
• pink hiking boots for Jude – the most ugly, but very comfortable boots I could find
• storage – cheap, but we need to get everything in there using a forklift as it is above another storage unit with no fixed access! If you can help let us know!
• our first vaccination for Japanese encephalitis and typhoid – only 3 more injections to go (the second one for Japanese E and 2 more for tick borne E)
• flights booked to Singapore
• new tyres on the car, including spare wheel and second spare

We’re still waiting for a few things we ordered online. Soon we will be the new proud owners of:

• a new camera – small but with great zoom
• new driver’s licences – we had to renew them as they would have run out in the middle of the year which would be slightly impractical
• a safe – to be added to a secret location in the car 🙂
• a sat phone – second hand but still with warranty (thanks Andre for picking it up for us!)
• a mini safe to put our spare key in – yes, we expect to loose our key at some point, wouldn’t you?

I’ve decided to start collecting e-books and audio books for on the way as I might get bored of Jon’s taste of music. If you have any you can email or dropbox me that would be really appreciated! I have a few already, so more than happy to do some swaps.

Yesterday evening we got together with Rob & Robyn, Guy & Cheryl and Miles. We are going to ship our vehicles together with the first 2 couples so we wanted to make sure Lara and Rob & Robyn’s truck would fit in the container together. They do, with 36cm to spare (on a total of 12.01m internal length of the container). Plenty of space.

And, we also have decided on a name for our trip (everybody has a name of their trip so we didn’t wanna be left behind): LOST + FOUND ADVENTURES. We will lose things (and hopefully find them again) and we’re hoping we will get lost along the way too, maybe we should have a chat with Clayton to get some advice on how to find those shortcuts! But most importantly we hope to only lose time and find lots of great memories and friends along the way!

We’ve made a logo for it as well:

Do you like it? Did you notice our route in the background on the suitcase? (we think it is brilliant!) I’ll add it to our blog soon, but now I’d better get on with the making of the mozzie box, the wine box and the box with no name yet.