And now for something completely different

Doing web design, whilst chasing cows out of your front garden… you don’t see that happening in London! Living in the countryside whilst we do the last few things before our trip is taking a little bit of adjusting to, but it’s great!

It’s now been just over a week since we left London and we had hoped to have made good progress with Bertha, our four-wheeled friend, by this stage. However, the last time we checked up on her, she looked like this (well, her rear axle did):

Bertha is in safe hands though, with a friendly mechanic, undergoing a service before her MOT. The signs are all fairly positive, as the only things which require attention are a minor issue with the rear brakes and a leisure battery which is leaking vaguely explosive hydrogen. Thank goodness we hadn’t got round to testing the gas yet! So with these things being fixed (delayed a little by a wait for parts), we’ve been focussing on the non-van-related things to do for our trip, interspersed with a few other lovely activities.

The main thing that we’ve been focussing on is this site; specifically the KIST 2EU section. We’ve added an FAQs page (please ask us more questions to go on it!) and we’re slowly working through the creation of our country guides. They’re not going to rival Lonely Planet, but they should at least hold all of the pertinent information that we’ll need in one place. There’s still work to be done on an infographics page; something that has to be done considering my background in data analysis and Kiri’s graphic design skills. We also still need to work out exactly how we’re going to display a map of our route as we go along – we’ll write a separate blog post shortly about our testing of a GPS device.

There have also been a few purchases that we’ve been making; the most significant of which is fabric for re-upholstering the seats in the living area and making new curtains. After a lot of research (including visiting this website which has a great quote of “We offer a discount to OAPs on a Wednesday”), we decided that we’ll use cotton dust sheets as the main fabric (£10.99 for a 12′ by 9′ sheet!), then sew patches of interesting material onto them to brighten it all up. I also spent a couple of hours servicing and setting up our folding bikes so the chain doesn’t fall off when you change gear!

With all of this busyness, our Lightbulb Head work has taken a bit of a back seat, however it was great to see Pig and Porter in action at the Ashburnham Flower show and taste their wares. Seriously, with beer and food that tasty, which sells itself, they don’t really need the website for marketing, but we’re spending a bit of time working with them whilst we’re in the area.

We have also attempted to do a countryside time lapse video to rival the one we did in London before we left (Oval crossroads). On our first day here, Norman the local farmer was mowing a field, so we set up a camera expectantly… It turns out that there’s a slower pace of life outside London (plenty of tea breaks in the mowing!), so the resulting time lapse doesn’t particularly work on its own. We’ll combine it into another bit of film work at some stage though.

As for the “lovely activities”, these have included a barbecue followed by watching shooting stars, a visit to play pirate golf in Hastings and attending the local MI (men’s institute) meeting. We could get used to village life!