Recent Planning Activity

Things are moving ahead on a couple of fronts:

• We are going to contact a visa service in Glendale to see if they can sort everything out in one go. We also want to get brand new passports. Neither of our pictures look anything like us now. Mine is also all beaten to hell. I don't think it can be read properly by those machines you see at immigration.
• Mike is contacting all the people that expressed interest in joining us somewhere along the way. A big part of making this a success will be arranging local guides and getting friends into the act. It will be too hard to go a year without seeing friends and family. Also, we will probaby kill eachother if left w/ only ourselves for company for too long.
• There are a couple of long flights in our future and some of them won't be cheap. We've broken out expenses by daily food and lodging and expensive transfers. So far, budgetting looks good. This whole thing may come in under $50,000.
• Some work has been put into getting medical insurance. It looks like a year of cover will run about a grand. We just need to settle on a policy and purchase away.

Other things on the horizon:

• Leaving parties. Hosting one in LA? Also hosting one in NY? And maybe Lon as well?
• Need to book tickets for Antarctica pretty soon.
• World Cup ticket lottery starts on Feb 1st.
• Mike needs to complete his innoculations.

More Blog Improvements

A few changes here:

• Put schedule information into the sidebar. That makes it a lot easier to get an "at a glance" look at what we are up to.
• Added a static link to the visas entry.
• Fixed some dates and info that was incorrect in some of the South American destinations.
• Moved 'Contributors' down to the bottom.
• Comments are now mailed to a Y! Groups addr that will be read by both of us.

I tried using the "post by email" feature of this thing, but I couldn't seem to make it work. Will play a bit more later. Also, I'd like it if there was a mailing list associated with the blog that got mailed with each new entry. I will see about that as well.

Visas

Most of the countries we'll be visiting will let us stay there for a month or more without throwing a tantrum. However, there are a select few that require us foreigners to ask permission and make nice. So, we will. Paperwork will be done. Fees will be paid. Asses will no doubt be kissed. Whatever it takes.

The List:

• Russia
• China
• Vietnam
• India
• Australia
• Brazil

Blogger Template Customization

We were not completely happy with our blogger template, so I dove in and made a few simple changes. Basically we are looking to reduce the height of the header, and use the image from our business cards in the upper left corner. The latter is not yet done. I also had a go at moving the nav bar to the left, but it was more trouble than I was willing to deal with. We are going to retool the Operation Cromulent website so that it matches the design of Le Blog.