A week to Monsoon Mania

A week to go.....
My darling wife and I have decided to up sticks and leave County Tyrone for the sunny shores of Southern California. And since emigrating obviously involves quitting your job, clearing out your house and all the other annoying things involved in a move like this we decided that it would be the perfect time to spend a bit of time travelling in Asia before settling down to life in SoCal. Our provisional plan is to travel to India for 2 months before making our way to South East Asia for a further 5 weeks but adaptability is essential when travelling and those plans may change.
That brings me around to this blog, why am I writing it? Considering that I failed English literature at GCSEs and most of this blog will be off the cuff I definitely don't see myself as the next Jack Kerouac or Michael Palin so you may have to forgive me for the boring writing and bad grammar!  Rather the main purpose of this blog is to simply let as many of our family and friends know about as much of our trip details as possible, as opposed to sending individual small emails. In saying that I am still making it public just in case I'm recognised by the big publishers and they will pay me to travel the world and write travel blogs! However it will be anonymous, but those of you who know us will know who we are.
At the moment I am sitting here in our house which will have a new occupant next month, and nursing a hangover from our work leaving-do last night (thanks for all the kind words and more importantly the craic last night folks!). I'm surrounded by Gumtree's latest additions, shipping boxes and a various assortment of rubbish that builds up in your house over a few years due to hoarding for various unlikely scenarios that you imagine could just be around the corner but never seem to arrive. However a few visits from gumtree bargain hunters, to the local skip, and to various charity shops have meant that we are on top of our clutter. However we still have lots to do before the take off  on Thursday and that along leaving family, friends and colleagues has been to the forefront of our minds forcing the mighty subcontinent back into the little nooks and crannies in our heads.
Your guaranteed a reaction when you tell someone that you are going to India. But my wife summed it up perfectly from another blog that she reads. That is people have one of two reactions, there is the negative and the positive. The negative of course is INDIA? Why do you want to go there? I heard you cant even drink the water there? Did you know there is dead bodies in the street and people piss on them?.... The list goes on. The positive of course is INDIA! That's fantastic! I hear its an amazing place! Oh I would love to go there! Your going to have a fantastic time... There is always a reaction, no one ever seems to say soberly, "India oh right have a nice time then".
So then, why India? After the travelling that I had done before I met my wife in various places in Asia and Africa I was always looking to make time for a extended bit of travelling in India. I always thought that I would spend about 6 months travelling around India giving me as much time as required to see the whole country. Unfortunately I never seemed to have eked out any time for extended travel anywhere in the past 10 years, this time around for various reasons we have given ourselves 3 months, which as I have said isn't what I expected but its not bad. And it should be adequate time to see and do everything that we want.
 Hopefully I get a few more spare moments during the week to go into what we want to see and do when we get there and more detailed reasons as to why we are travelling to Asia in the first place, but to do that I will have to get rid of this bric-a-brac. Anyone need a printer, rug or DVD player?