Neil's prepartion

She who must be obeyed decreed that I must ‘blog’ – not sure what that is but here is my preparation for the Shell and Neil SKIing Tour.
As you can see from Shell’s Why & Where Blog where are away for 208 days and as usual it is my responsibility to plan the details.

Obviously blogging is going to be another ‘pain in the arse’ add in to my responsibilities – doing stuff for others and not for me but will be a good record of the trip for family and friends.

In 2009 we talked about ‘doing’ Gallipoli and discussed that the 100 year anniversary was coming up.  Within a week or so of this discussion the advertisement by Military History Tours was in the Weekend Australian.  We investigated and signed up.  Shell realised that the Rugby World Cup was in the same hemisphere in the same year and suggested we stay.  After much convincing I sort of agreed it was a good idea and set about investigating the fill in.

The Pilgrimage of St James – ‘The Camino’ came across our path.  They say if you are meant to do it you will keep receiving coincidences until you do.  This happened to us.  One Friday we decided that we would walk the 2000km from Le Puy-en-Velay in France to Santiago – 2000km – the very next day we went to Brisbane, stopped at a coffee shop at New Farm and what should we see but Claude Trauchant selling her book ‘Boots to Bliss’ - a French woman living in Australia who had walked the French and Spanish Camino’s nearly the same as we planned, and the coincidences went on from there.

When planning the trip I stumbled across the existence of the Shengen Agreement in Europe which dictates that you may only visit without a visa in the Shengen Agreement Countries for 90 days in any 180 days.  We would have nearly exceeded our 90 days with just the Camino.  I wrote to every Country’s Embassy, that we proposed to visit, to seek an extended visa to allow us to visit longer.  The outcome was, to our surprise, that this was in no way possible.  They gave visas for students and workers but not tourists who spend money???? The only country that would allow us to re enter was Germany who advised that we could come and go as often as we like but each re-entry needed to be from non Schengen area.

So after 6 months of reasonably detail planning for the 2000km walk and to enable a ‘budget’ to be formed,  it was back to the drawing board.

Things to be planned for such a long trip away include:

-          Flights and transport
-          Accommodation

• Camino Albergues (hostels) recommendations and distances from each other
• Airbnb
• Hotels – Booking.com
• Friends and family

-          Car hire
-          Events we would like to see / participate in
-          Budget, budget, budget
-          And more

I am looking forward to all of the aspects of the trip and only 15 days to go, and still many issues to tie up while still leaving us enough time/space to be flexible about our un-committed time

Neil