Money, money, money..

Another advantage of the rainy bank holiday weekend was a chance to get the more 'fiddly' parts of the trip sorted. My house sale had recently completed so we had good reason to sort the finances out. Another reason for doing this is most credit cards and maestro cards charge for use abroad, obviously 4 1/2 months of charges for us both was likley to be considerable. A quick bit of reasearch on moneysavingexpert.com provided the answers we needed and a recommendation for a credit card without crossboarder charges and a bank account that won't charge you for withdrawing cash from machines abroad: the Post Office credit card and a joint Nationwide current account. With a bit of clever planning (and a direct debit to pay the credit card off automatically each month), we should never be charged by our accounts for using the facilities abroad and be able to use the protection offered when buying on a credit card. We also opted for the card protection insurance giving us both cover for a year £18 this gave us extra insurance and means we only have to ring one number to cancel all our cards should the worst happen.

Oh - and the exciting bit! We finally booked flights and our first hotel! We fly to Baltimore on the 15th July (return on the 1st December) with BA the day before the Camel could potentially arrive and with any luck will pick it up soon after and get on the road... or alternatively we may be waiting around for 5 days for it to turn up, apparently it all depends on the weather in the Atlantic. Still, we've got some bits for the trip to buy, so that will give me plenty of oportunity for American shopping! Lucky Dan...