T minus 13 hours

Will be even less by the time you all read this.

By this time tomorrow, I should be all packed and ready to go. Best laid plans and all that though. I was planning on leaving for my daughter's place at 14:00 but instead, I have to go to the dentist to have a repair done on one of my teeth, after a piece broke off! Still, I'm anticipating I'll still be on the road by about 15:30. That makes my eta in Wales around about 19:00.

As things stand, I have a load of clothes piled up on the bed and 1 pannier bag. Let down by BMW, I shall have the other pannier bag this afternoon but not the top box bag, so my faithful old rucksack will need to fill that space. It's an inconvenience but I'm trying to get some compo, in the form of a refund on the cost of the bag. Even with 2 bags and a rucksack, I'm not sure all the stuff I've got out to take will fit. I guess it depends how many times I want to turn my pants inside out 😉 I'm sure I'll get everything I want/need in.

Ginny has been serviced, so I'll be good to engage warp speed on the trip across to Wales, if necessary. I expect she'll need a fill up on the way, so I'll make a slight detour through Bracknell to Sainsburys to avoid getting stung by the thieves at the motorway service stations. Mind you, every time I go past a petrol station these days, the price has gone up a penny!

Waiting for me, hopefully, when I arrive at Jen's, will be some dinner. Jen swears by Chris's cooking, so I'm looking forward to whatever he cooks up.

Saturday I have a fairly leisurely 2 hour ride to Pembroke, followed by another 2 hour ride the other side, to Portlaoise. Sandwiched in between is a 4 hour ferry trip.

Looking at the weather forecast, it's not looking great, getting worse the further west I go. I'll probably be in waterproofs when I arrive in Wales and again when I hit Irish soil in Rosslare. Grizzly was going to ride down to meet me but I think he'll prefer to stay at home if it's going to be peeing down. I can't blame him. Sunday still looks a bit iffy but if we are lucky, we'll escape the showers. Then it's fingers crossed for race week.

As from tomorrow, I'll try and do a 'captain's log' type update, such as I did last year. Makes life a bit easier for me,  keeping  up to date with what's happening during the day, rather than writing deep into the night.

That's all for now.