First of all we´d like to thank you for all these lovely messages and texts we got from you. Thanks for the good energy it gave us for our trip!

Our last day before departure we spent packing and cleaning our flat. In the late evening we went to Heathrow to spent the last night in a ´lounge´ in terminal 3. After finding a cosy corner we laid down on our mattresses and watched builders coming in… There were a lot of them… And they had heavy and noisy tools with them. We were quite concerned about what was going to be happening that night, just meters from our cosy corner. To put our mind on more pleasant things we started watching people´s shoes. And the floors. And here came Risky´s comment: ´There is a granite floor in the Poznan airoprt. Not like in this Heathrow´s terminal - some artificial composite.´ There you go. First reason to come back to Poznan.  Good choice we made.

In the morning, after a peaceful night full of sleep, builders´jokes and drilling, we made our way to check in to our flight to Madrid. On the way we weighted our bags and ourselves. 2 news came from that excersize – a good one and a bad one. Good one is that our bags weighted 33 kilos alltogether. Bad news is that Witka weights 65 kilos.

All these weights will change soon. Witka can´t wait to see these changes.

After an hour spent in beautiful Barajas airport in Madrid (with marble floors – no comments from Risky this time) we boarded huuuge Airbus just to find  that there is a stubborn Peruvian sitting on our seats. A little missunderstanding and the stewardess offered one of us a seat in business class… Unfortunately we love each other and didn´t want to be separated. We all agreed to send there this stubborn Peruvian guy. Lucky him. He probably doesn´t love anyone. But has an awesome service, free alcohol and a seatbed.

We waved Europe goodbye and departed towards Poznan.

After 12 hours flight and hours of figuring out the time difference, distances and speed of our airbus we landed in Lima. And there there was a big surprise waiting for us…

In the madness of preparations and packing we did a quick summary of our 4 years in London. We played a bit, did some simple maths and these are the numbers sums up our life here:

- 1.5 hrs - the longest commuting time to/from work (one way, half a year of travelling)

- 3 - number of places we lived in in London

- 10 - number of countries visited from London


- 16 sqm – the area of our favourite flat


- 33 kg - approximate weight of stuff taken on our journey

- 38 - number of nationalities among our friends


- 400 kg - weight of stuff sent to Poland

 - 1200 km – distance that Risky did on his bike during the last 4 months

- 1400 km – distance that Witka walked during last year

Obviously in Poznan our life will be a bit different. We wont have friends from 38 countries. Instead we will have small amount of old, waterproof, bombproof and tested in many ways friends Neither we will be moving places so often. We have the pleasure to own a small flat in Poznan. Although not much is in there… To be honest, there is only a toilet bowl…But our own, beautiful toilet bowl!!

None of us thinks that we will have to commute to work 1.5hrs. Our dream is to commute 30 seconds… From bed to our desks… Don’t think it is possible, but let us dream.

OK, time to close our backpacks and head home.

Next post will be from Peru.

“To the west, to the west…” we haven’t got there yet

Getting ready.

‘I’m working on a dream’ by Bruce Springsteen was played on the radio when we were booking tickets Round The World. That was a good sign. Well, none of us believes in signs… But OK, let it be, it was a sign. And it helped us watching the money disappearing from our account. This was a year ago… And neither of us can believe that year has passed since that moment and we have only couple of weeks left before departure.

Languages

As we know speaking foreign languages is very useful while travelling, although not necessary. We decided to stick to that first adjective: useful. Both of us speak English, although sometimes I don’t understand Scottish people. Risky is better in that. However Scottish people often don’t understand each other so I shouldn’t worry. Therefore we are going to use our English (Risky with Scottish accent, Witka with… well… accent).

OK, but the first part of our trip leads through South America, where English can be used by very few people… Spanish would be more useful there… OK, here we go: el viaje es muy largo, vamos a la playa, quiero una cerveza, muchas gracias… Easy peasy

Equipment

The list of equipment were expanding every day since the day we had bought the tickets. It was growing till we figured out our budget. Then it started to shrink. With every minute. Part of our stuff had to be replaced, we bought couple of must-have gadgets (among them Risky’s favourite gadged: head torch). We also had to test the staff. For that reason Risky’s favourite gadget wasn’t disappearing from our heads for a week, which helped us save 47p on electricity bill. Generally, you can’t predict what will be useful in such a trip. Whenever we had doubts whether to buy sth or not, to take sth with us or not, we used our common senses. That’s why my many many colourful skirts are staying at home and Risky is not taking his cross line laser level with him.

We’re in process of last minute shopping, finalising all paper work, saying good-byes to London and our friends…

Now there is another song which can’t get out of our minds – ‘The Road’ by Frank Turner… It helps us whenever our patience fails… We are sooooo looking forward to the 1st of October!