Much as I am looking forward to travelling again in June 2021, it is with a guilty conscience. Bridgets’ Swansong tour has a budget of almost £38,000 for the first leg to Australia. Some £8,000 of that would otherwise have been spent living at home for the eight months, but £30,000 could have been a cash donation to Save the Children!
I have gambled that those of you that like to follow, and live my adventure vicariously through these blog posts, would help me make up those lost funds by making donations whenever you can. Any sponsors I manage to persuade to join this final adventure of Bridget’s Swansong will be making donations in support of Save the Children. You will have noticed in the sidebar of this webpage, or near the bottom of the page if you are browsing with your mobile, that there is a link to my Save the Children fund-raising page. I have tried to explain on the page why I raise funds for children’s charities and earnestly ask you to consider also supporting the charity. Surely between all of us we can recoup the lost £30,000 for them.
The plans for the tour are progressing well with the possible addition of a route taking in a large part of south-east Asia between leaving Japan and arriving in New Zealand. A final decision on this may not be made until I am ready to leave Japan, as visas are available at the borders for most countries involved.
I have started to approach possible commercial sponsors and the outcome of that will decide what the car will look like at our departure. I hope to do a ‘reveal’ of Bridget in her leaving fashion in April. I have no idea what she will look like at the end of the first leg (after our experience across Africa there’s no guessing), but to be able to enter either New Zealand or Australia, I know she has to be clean!
I am almost half-way through my winter stay on the Canary Islands and will return to the UK at the beginning of March to start collecting visas etc. I’m hoping my next post will be able to include which route through Europe we will take, which will depend to some extent on which gateway into Russia we will using. I will need to firm that up for my Russian visa application.