An Introduction

Hi, Andy here - or Andrew or indeed whatever you want to call me. I wanted to use this space to let anyone who is interested know a little about myself and Kate in terms of our travel plans (see below), our thoughts and feelings before we depart, and various other generic 'blog' conventions. Hopefully it won't be too generic, and, thinking about it, as a complete newbie to weblogging, I'm sure it will fail to follow any unwritten blog-lore/code of conduct, rather ending up becoming a tangled mess of sentences (such as this one) amounting to our excitement, apprehension, eagerness, fear, elation, along with many other thesaurus-gained abstract nouns... Oh dear, I sound like a pretentious arse already - but let's just see how this one plays out.

In a nutshell, our plan is to spend 253 days out of the UK, travelling first to the USA, then onward to Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. We didn't want to do it on the cheapy-come-scummy cheap, nor could we afford to do it first class all the way (or premium economy either for that matter). We wanted comfortable, but affordable to the average Joes like us who have been slumming it on almost minimum-wage for nearly two years! We will explain in much more detail what we're doing and how we went about saving for it in later entries to this blog. It might get boring, but I'll attempt to intersperse it with cutting witticisms and playful wisecracks to keep your attention throughout!

Anyways, enough with the introduction to the introduction, and on to the introduction of the two loveable protagonists in this unfolding adventure: Kate and Andrew. Due to my paranoia toward identity fraud, I won't give our surnames or other personal details that would give a would-be scallywag the oportunity to become one of us...although why anyone would want to become me is something of a brainteaser... he'd need to pull off long-haired T-shirt wearing self proclaimed 'scruff' who listens to 'difficult music' and quotes the works of Chris Morris and Trey Parker far too much. The scamster would also have to pretend to have grown up in Bradford, studied computer science at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where he would need to pretend he met his wonderful girlfriend of 4 years! THEN our rapscallion would need to blag that he worked as a projectionist for a year and a half post-graduation at UCI Norwich, then as a lowbie popcorn scooper-cum-body-spillage-cleaner-upperer at Odeon Leeds/Bradford for 4 months after. It all seems like far too much effort for our would-be swindler - they might as well just mug someone in the street. (Oh, and if you're wondering about the term 'difficult music', its not really my term - avid readers of this blog will find out in due course what I listen to...then can make up their own mind!)

It just wouldn't be right to concoct an equally poor ruse to introduce that wonderful girlfriend of 4 years, as I'm sure she will add her own in due course... that is if she can work out how to use the computer - she is arts graduate afterall! All I will say is she's fab and I genuinely couldn't think of a greater person to travel the world with... except of course for Lucy Liu, but I'm sure she'd let me off for that one so long as I gave her Jack White!

That's quite enough of the shenanigans methinks. In the next part I'll write in more detail about where we are planning to travel and what we're wanting to do while there! If you haven't fallen asleep already, congratulations!

Andrew.