Time to reflect.

It is about 10pm at night (Moscow time) and I am on a train stopped somewhere in the Russian wilderness on the edge of Siberia and the Ural mountains. This is the first time in the last few weeks that I have been able to properly sit down and get the laptop out to write a blog post. That, and I have some heavy duty Russians snoring very near me making it a nightmare to get some sleep!

I started my blog whilst my wife and I were on our campervan tour through Europe and it has been some while since I wrote my last post; since then we have sold our self-built camper, which I can honestly say I am gutted to have done so but the costs of exporting it to New Zealand were prohibitive. And we are now on the road again making an epic journey to Vietnam by train. After this post I will be carrying on with this adventure and every now and then dipping back to a part of the campervan tour.

When you are away from home on holiday or on your travels it is so easy to have that renewed passion and vigor to not only take on new challenges, but to absolutely crush them and feel proud of yourself. On the same hand it is so easy when you go back home to get absorbed into the hundred and one different things that everyone always needs to do.

Visa’s

We had five weeks at home to organize and obtain visas for Belarus, Russia, Mongolia and China. Each one requiring visits to London for various levels of interviews, finger print scans and application submissions. The level of detail these required is worthy of its own blog post, suffice to say that we had to supply an entire booked and paid for itinerary for each country, which in itself was redundant as the Chinese Visa is for a two year multiple entry visa which requires no supporting documents for any future entry…

Five weeks: bags of time to see friends and family, finish buying the bits we needed to transition from campervan travel to backpack travel, get our visas and maybe even fit in a little work to refill the coffers. I am actually genuinely laughing as I write this as barely any of that happened at all, the time ran so quickly that we never got to see half as many people as we wanted; even amongst our own families. And the greatest sin is that I haven’t written a blog post in that time!

One of my challenges through life has always been biting off more than I can chew. With my professional life I realized that, and I have grown and improved upon it, but that desire to do too much for myself and for everyone else reappeared with style. So on reflection I now understand I need to become a little more disciplined in saying no…. until they create a 30 hour day. For now though I can stare outside at the snow capped forests and frozen rivers and write my next post.