The many strands of life weave themselves differently depending on the attention that is paid to them.  And circumstances that push a thread into prominence take a part too.

Over the last 17 months bicycling, travelling and the outdoors have been at the fore-front. A chance that was long-awaited and deliberately under-planned.  We’d both talked long and often about the opportunity to take off on an adventure without a defined end.  Either in time, distance or place.

Lately, the seasons have forced consideration of when we get where.  The small matter of an almost botched phone job interview in Colombia back in August somehow relegated to an almost remembered ‘shelf’.

Now an end is solid, concrete, unavoidable (for me) and even printed on several bits of paper.  It’s plastered across several emails detailing clinic rosters and on-call rotations.  I’m emerging into the glare of work-related emails talking about my supervision of trainees and which conferences I’ll go to and when I want leave.  Even which weekends I don’t want disturbed.  This is to us for whom saying when and where we’lll be even a couple of days in advance is something we’ve avoided.  Both for practical reasons and to maintain the truth-illusion of the undefined end.

Then a couple of days ago I sealed things further – we finally bought some ‘plane tickets from South America to Australia.  Getting that specific wasn’t hard, but now’ve we’ve promised to be somewhere at sometime.  The psychology of a most unwelcome task was aided by the realisation that most flights to Oz go via Santiago, Chile even if you start off from Buenos Aires.  Our main problem has been that where we get to defines which of these two capitals we commence the international leg of our journey.  A fall-back suggested was to buy the Santiago to Perth leg, then the rest when we finally admit where from.

So.

We arrive in Perth on Good Friday, 6th April 2012.  Things are set up so that we will ride our bikes home from the airport, thus perpetuating the journey as long as possible.

There – it’s said, so it must be true and happening.