West Ealing

It’s 24 hours until departure and we are now focussed on remembering everything we need to take with us (which we suspect is impossible!). Choosing what clothes to take is not such an issue it’s more about the other things that will make our time living on the train and in the Gobi Desert more comfortable (travel pillows, flasks, tea, coffee, sugar, milk, wet wipes, toilet seat covers, spare toilet rolls etc etc etc). Apologies in advance - this is probably not the last time you will see the word ‘toilet’ in our blog! Also critical is remembering all of the chargers for the range of electrical equipment we’re taking (3 iPads, 4 iPhones, camera, 2 kindles, 2 headphones, remote control etc etc) plus 6 battery chargers as there will be limited access to electric supplies at some stages. Later today we will have to pack everything into our two bags and hope that it all fits. Fingers crossed!

A few statistics before we go. We will complete around 11,500 miles from start to finish, with over 5,000 of these miles on the train. Our longest single rail journey is a four day, 3,200 mile trip across Russian Siberia. We’ll be off to Heathrow tomorrow morning for our BA (help!!!) flight to St Petersburg departing 9:20am . We’ll keep in touch all the way.Les mer