Now here’s a suggestion for all you potential travellers: perhaps don’t optimistically schedule your date of departure four weeks after when you hope your operation will be performed, based entirely on the vague assumption of an ill-informed NHS surgeon.  This is not the most sensible beginning to the trip of a lifetime.

I’ve been suffering horrible undiagnosed attacks for two years.  Having finally been diagnosed with gallstones this spring, I was promised an operation to remove the offending organ “by the end of the summer”.  So, big travel plans in mind, I breezily quit my job with two months notice, intending to depart at the end of August and march directly from my desk to the operating table.  Gallbladder whipped out, two weeks of recuperation, two further weeks of no-heavy-lifting, then off we’d jolly well go on the first Eurostar out of St Pancras to Brussels and tally ho, hello Moscow, forwards to the Trans-Siberian, and so forth.

Life, of course, is never quite so simple.  I was lucky in that my operation only ended up taking place a few weeks after I’d anticipated, but it was nonetheless a scalpel-shaped spanner in the works.  So here I am, 24th September, only mid-way through week two of house arrest, and doggedly planning a departure for 12th October.  “Why not shift the whole thing on by a fortnight or a month?” I hear you cry.  A fair question; but Peter has to be in Melbourne for a wedding 8th November so, unfortunately, we’re working to a strict schedule (something I more or less hope to avoid for the remainder of our trip and/or lives).

But since you can only apply for a Russian tourist visa when you know your exact dates of arrival and departure, we’re only putting our forms in today.  And because the application process is so fraught with pitfalls, we’re loathe to buy Trans-Siberian tickets without a visa and potentially lose £400.  So when friends ask “soooo have you booked your tickets yet?” the answer is a shifty “erm, not exactly” and I don’t think anyone believes that we’re actually going to be going when we say we’re going to be going.  Which is fair enough, because I’m not sure I do either.

Well suck on THAT because today marks a momentous occasion: two one-way tickets purchased from London St Pancras to Berlin Hauptbahnhof!  My advice is to use The Trainline Europe.  Not only is it an extremely simple process, with everything in English and a really pleasant interface, our tickets were €100 cheaper per person than they would have been if purchased individually via Eurostar and www.bahn.de.

So, for just £90 each, and with fingers tightly crossed that we really will only need 20 minutes to change at Bruxelles-Midi (the Man in Seat 61 says yes) and then we will be up, up and away, except on ground level.

Now everybody just needs to cross their fingers and hope that we haven’t cocked up our applications, and Mr Putin and the Russian consulate are feeling helpful.  And if you wouldn’t mind reassuring me that it’s an entirely achievable goal to fix the sitting room lights and the blocked kitchen sink, pack up, move out, rent the flat, research travel insurance, purchase remaining items, throw a going-away party, catch up with old friends, learn how to work the RSS on this bloody website, learn how to convert the bloody RSS feeds to emails on MailChimp, and depart for a minimum 7-month trip . . . in two and a half weeks . . . whilst recovering from abdominal surgery . . . then that would be ever so helpful.  LET’S DO THIS.