DjMagra’s stuff ‘n’ stuff

Grrr! That’s about all I can say to Singapore Air’s 20kg baggage restriction. The amount of fantastic books, clothes, and bits and bobs that I have spent a lifetime collecting have been sold, given away or thrown out over the past few weeks. It’s somewhat soul destroying having to give away books that haven’t been read, or clothes that haven’t been worn, simply because it’s far too expensive to ship them around the other side of the world. This really is a fresh new start, with nothing but a few t-shirts, a suit and some shorts to get me started!

I think a 20kg limit is absolutely measly, especially as most decent quality suitcases are going to be around 5kg themselves, so, in theory you have 15kg to play with. Going over this really isn’t advisable either, as when Kas was flying back, we nearly fell over when they told us that their excess baggage charge was £45 per kilo!!

Aside from neglecting my blog as per usual!

I have had a hectic few weeks and months, deciding on, planning, and arranging a move out of cold, wet, grey London, to sunny Australia! In a weeks time from now, there will be no more London, no more tubes, no more crowds and no more getting wet all the time walking to and from work (even if it does rain here far far less than back in Ireland!). Kassie decided, for various reasons, to move back home to Brisbane a few months back, and I have finally seen sense and decided to do the same.

To say that I am excited about a move like this is a massive understatement. I’m sorry to say goodbye to an absolutely amazing company to work for, but as I’ve said to everyone since making my decision, sometimes certain things in life come along to take you off in a very different, and exciting direction, and those opportunities are too good to turn down!!

I am looking forward to taking a few weeks out without working, hooking up with Kassie and her family, Conor and Claire who have beaten me down to Brisbane, and all the other people I’ve got to know over the past year and a half down there. I can’t wait to explore the city and countryside with my camera on my back and take in something completely new to me. I can’t wait to feel heat on my bones all year round for a change!

I’m not sure how much the blog will be resuscitated over the coming weeks and months, I will try! Every time I go to make a concerted effort to update it, I just seem to loose interest again. I guess I do kind of have a good excuse now, to keep everyone back home updated on how I’m getting on. If you would like to see updates here, and they’re not forthcoming, please feel free to poke me until I get around to it. If you do want to see what I’m getting up to however, I can guarantee that my flickr stream will have pretty regular updates!

So, today I get to fly home (yay!) for the weekend. Great and all as that is, there is one part of it that’s a complete pain, the fact that I have to make my way over to Heathrow to get my plane. Flying to Ireland out of Heathrow doesn’t bother me, Terminal 1 is always nice and quiet, and it’s a 5 minute walk from the underground to the departure gate (gotta love online checkin!). But, getting to Heathrow itself is a pain. I live in East London, and I can see London City Airport out my window. It’s about 10 minutes there on the DLR, and it’s nice and quiet and easy to get to.

BUT…flights out of there are ridiclously expensive, especially if you want to fly at a resonable hour on a Friday / Sunday. Usually, every time that I go looking, my flights come in around £300, and whilst my time is precious, I just can’t make that a regular thing, especially when I can get a flight from Heathrow for around £60.

There is talk about expanding capacity at LCY, and in my mind it can’t come quick enough. It would also be nice to see another carrier taking on Cityjet (Air France) domination of the Dublin > London City route, Aer Arann where are you?!

I was in the middle of telling Kassie about the mayhem and madness of traffic around the Arc de Triomphe at the weekend when, true to form, we saw a bloke being knocked down off his scooter by a passing car. Luckily, we had the video rolling at the time, and whilst you can’t actually see the accident happen, you can hear it!

Greetings from the Apple Store in a cold, wet, windy Amsterdam. I have no internet access in the hotel, and haven’t really been there long enough to write anything anyways, so, I’ll save the updates for later. Having a fab time in Amsterdam, seeing hundreds of MINI’s driving along the roads of Holland is so much fun, makes up for the fact that we hardly saw any all the way from Ireland, through England and on through France and Belgium to here. I reckon everyone made the journey early in the week last week, which means that quite a lot should be on the road back with us tomorrow. Best journey I saw so far was from Moscow to here via St Petersburg, Stockholm, Helsinki etc. Will get some pics up soon with all the details, but, for now, I’m going to wait for the rain to clear and see the sights of Amsterdam.

UPDATE: Ok, I said I had updates to come, and I did / do. Unfortunately, they got completely side-tracked by other stuff that’s been going on, I haven’t even looked through the majority of my photo’s yet, but, hopefully sometime soon I’ll get around to writing a little more about the trip.

Ready, set, and (almost) go!

The bags are just about packed, MINI is about ready to go (need to give her a final clean and put all her MINI United stickers on tonight) and I’ve just worked out my final route to Zandvoort. I get the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead tomorrow, head over to Birmingham to collect Alan, then we’re on the road to Dover. An overnight in Dover, where hopefully we’ll get to hook up with some more MINI’s will be followed by an early ferry over to Calais, and then see us on the roads of France, Belgium and Holland to get to Zandvoort hopefully around mid-afternoon on Friday for the fun and games at MINI United.

The trip there will be about 750 miles (1,200 km) and should be a whole lot of fun. Seeing 8,000 MINI’s of all flavours descending on one small town is going to be some experience. There are plenty of camera’s packed, so, pictures should be in plentiful supply.

For anyone interested, here’s the map of our route:

And the full route details can be found here.