2 weekends to go! (& Travel Insurance)

Argh! ...Now I'm getting nervous. 2 weekends to go before Charlie Camel gets loaded in his container and Dans working tomorrow morning. Still a few jobs to be done: Steering box seals, some part of the transfew box is leaking again (forgive me, when Dan informs me of a new leak I just drift off into another fantasy world of clean driveways), 2 new UJ's needed on our quality new propshaft and the wiring in the vehicle needs sorting as well as the 2 new batteries and the heated seats... . The 'big yellow money sponge' is certainly living up to his name! :) We'll see how far we can progress this weekend as ideally I'd like next weekend for cleaning/polishing/packing and making a start sorting the house out!

My list of jobs yesterday included finally sorting our travel insurance. The nature of our trip was quite a strange one compared to most, so ringing up for 5 months worth of insurance travelling around in your own vehicle got some weird reactions. I did however discover backpacker policies which are designed to cover your for a long period of time in various locations. Luckily for us (well, Dan!) the trend of providing them only for the under 30's seems to have stopped and we were able to get a quote for such a Policy. After spending several weeks reading small print and almost falling off my chair with some of the quotes we recieved I stumbled across http://www.insureandgo.com/ . They have won a number of awards for their travel insurance and are FSA regulated. They provide more than adequate medical cover as well as the usual extras and more importantly have an 'adventure traveller' policy which includes the majority of activities we want to undertake. We had significant problems wanting to do a considerable amount of mountain biking and a few other things like white water rafting, climbing, horse riding etc. whilst out there. Luckily, insure and go covers us for this and pretty much anything else! (although some more 'serious' stuff does involve a small extra premium).

When ringing them they were very helpful, the only draw back seems to be the individual item limit of £150 and refusal to insure sports equipment. However, they added on the Laptop and Digital Camera for a small extra fee and suggested calling our house insurance about the bikes. ... Mm. Well, ok, Dan gave them a call and sure enough, they'll insure the bikes whilst we're away (as long as they are locked up when we're not riding them!) for up to £500 each. Excellent! The only other stumbling block was our plan to catch and internal flight and do some last minute snowboarding when we'd shipped the Camel off at the end of the trip. This is a dream of mine as I've never had a go at it before, but is only likley to happen if we've got enough cash left (so not very then!). Luckily this didn't phase 'Insure and Go' and they said 'just give us a call if you want to do it and we can cover you, a weeks notice is good but 48 hours if you can't do it will be ok!'. Excellent :)

We managed to cover both of us, the laptop and the Camera for 5 months for £317. Not bad I thought. Just one thing to look out for though if you're looking for some insurance for your own trip is the small print, our policy, like many others I looked at automatically stops if you 'come home' and you have to get a whole new policy if you fly out again, we could purchase 2 trips home for £12 each, but again, it's an extra.