Weekly Countdown: 4 weeks to go

I'm in a good frame of mind today, for a number of reasons:

• My bike was MoT'd last week and is now back on the road. The weather's been very nice the last few days, so I've managed to go out for a couple of rides.
• Last night I fought off a late challenge in my local Poker league and won the league by 15 points.
• But, most of all, it's now less than 1 month until my Road trip! Unfortunately that means it's even less time to my 50th birthday, but let's skip over that bit.

In terms of the trip, I think I'm fairly well advanced with the planning. The reason I think this is that I'm now starting to worry about the smaller details, and nice-to-haves. For example, I've started to look at how best to use my phone when I'm away. As data roaming chatges in the US are astronomical, I've started searching for an American PrePaid (or as we call them, Pay as You Go) SIM card with data, that I can buy when I arrive and use my HTC smart phone whilst I'm there. The best deal I've found so far is from AT&T, where you get unlimited calls and texts for $2 per day, and 100Mb (not much) of data for $19.99. Still expensive though compaired with what we're used to in the UK.

I've also been thinking about getting a bluetooth headset for my crash helmet, like this one, so the SatNav (which doubles as an MP3 player) and phone (which also doubles as an MP3 player) can be connected without wires. Do you think I'll also need my iPod? Just in case I run out of music?

One slight fly in the ointment though: I've been checking the status of my flights back from San Francisco, and they are full on the day I want to come home. So, contingency planning has kicked in, and it looks like flights from Seatle are a good option. I'll monitor the situation, but it's looking like I might need to make 3 flights in order to get home on time: SFO-SEA-LHR-NCL.

Days to departure: 28
Paydays to departure: 1.


Funding: Given up worrying about it!