Sometimes things happen that make you think that the world is trying to beat you down. That’s what the first part of 2018 has felt like... Within a week of each other, a couple of incidents made me question my faith in humanity, particularly those that live in our previously happy little apartment block in London. First my bike (luckily just my commuter/road bike) was stolen from the apartment bike storage location. This is the third bike we have had stolen in our 18 months of living here, however this is the first one that we think was nabbed by someone who lives in the building (the other ones were from forced entry). You would think that with an abundance of CCTV in the building, it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out what happened. Unfortunately, this is not the case - with a particularly unhelpful building manager, that footage is proving elusive. Less than a week later, it was another friendly neighbour who decided that the stairwell was the perfect spot to go to the toilet. That sat there for 3-4 days and as you can imagine didn’t do wonders for smell across the flats. Venting over. Thankfully, things are looking up and our planning is starting to take (scarily real) shape, and our apartment is filling up with all our bike touring goodies. We have panniers, sleeping bags, sleeping mats, a tent, clothing, and cooking equipment. Most exciting of all was the delivery of our bikes: two shiny new Surly Disc Truckers taking refuge in our apartment. All thanks to the help of the guys at Spa Cycles (awesome touring experts in Harrogate). These babies are going to be our best friends (and potentially worst enemies at times...) for over 7,0000km, and it was nice to finally meet them. We’re still thinking of names for the two-wheelers: Charlie’s is a pretty baby blue and Naomi’s a sleek dark silver. Our thinking is that the names will naturally present themselves to us. The lasting thought with all of this is that life is full of ups and downs, excitement and disappointment, the good, the bad and the downright stinky. I guess this will just stand as another part of the preparations and training given it doesn't take a large dose of realism to know that we will have a lot more of those roller-coasters to come! BEST BIT: Delivery of our new Surlys WORST BIT: Stolen bike / stairwell poo
