69 Days to go!

69 days to go! In a week it will be 2 months to go, only 8 weeks, and time (hopefully) will start to fly. We are at a point now where it feels like we are so close yet so far. 69 days is still a relatively long time. March has only just ended so June seems to be miles away and yet we move out of our home in just over a month. When I think of that measly 4 or 5 weeks and how much we still have to pack or sell, I start to panic a little bit!

Athlone

Until yesterday we still hadn't finalised where we were going to store the few bits and pieces we are keeping. Since yesterday we now have two options. My mum has just bought a house and furnishing that for rental will mean some of the space in her storage container is freed. If that falls through, the lovely-as-ever Miss Nails has offered us space in her garage. Looking around our house though, it's still a 'real house'. There is a huge collection of currently-on-Trade-Me items covering our dining table, and a few boxes behind it, but generally speaking, very little has changed.

We are following the path or the Euro and Pound with concentrated beady eyes as we wait for it to hit a high. We have watched them over the last few months, recording where they're at every few days so that when they hit good prices we know they're 'good' compared to where they've been. I've never cared in the slightest before whether dollars were up or down or round in circles but I can tell you know that when we first started watching the exchange rates there were some very good prices available. Over the last few months they proceeded to then hit some very bad prices and now they're on their way back.

We have about half of our projected savings sitting waiting patiently to be turned into funny money and as soon as a good price is available we will be loading them all onto a Loaded for Travel card with Kiwibank. It's basically a prepaid credit card that can hold up to 5 different currencies. The benefit here is that we can convert all of our money at the best rate possible and then not have to worry about further transaction fees when we are away. Has anyway used one of these before? I'm curious as to what the catch is.

As you know, most of what needs to be booked in advance, is. There are still a few buses and trains and tours that can't be booked until closer to the time however, and one of those, the bus from Dublin Airport to our first stop in Athlone, just opened up for sale. So a bus isn't very exciting, but there's a reason I've been waiting less-than-patiently for these to come up - the first few tickets that are sold are available for €1 per person, each way. It's a 2 hour, 16 minute journey worth €24. In Kiwi terms, the return trip should have cost us $NZ200 and we got it for $NZ7.63. I call that a success.

The question that I await the answer to is 'How many people will Courtney have murdered by the time we get to Athlone?'. Starting in Christchurch at midnight, we fly to Kuala Lumpur, wait a few hours, fly to London, wait 6 hours, fly to Dublin, wait 2 hours and then bus to Athlone. We arrive at 1.46am on a Sunday morning according to the bus timetable, and after 37 and a half hours in transit, I'm pretty sure he'll be ropeable. Anyone want to take bets on it?