Coming out of retirement, again.

Tanzania - Serbia - Montenegro - Germany - Switzerland - UK - Tunisia - Canada - US - France. A few things have happened since I last wrote - and I've allowed the details of my adventures slip away unwritten. I'm back to the keyboard now because I'm determined not to let this next one get away.

I'm on a high speed train to Amsterdam to meet up with Carrie. She is flying in from South Africa, where she has been living since we arrived there on our bicycles two years ago.

We decided that it was high time to get rolling together again.

We've got our bikes, our passports, and two one way tickets to Istanbul. The plan (if you can call it that) is to ride west and north, until we reach Paris. I have a map of "the balkans" at a scale of 1:2000000, which renders it more useful for dreaming than for navigating. We'll figure it out as we go along. The flight leaves tonight and the pedals will start spinning on Thursday.

In the meantime, we will have about 9 hours in Amsterdam/Utrecht to make a surprise visit to our good friend, Bastiaan. We've made an appointment at his office under some fake names and will arrive dressed as a crocodile and a dalmation. We want to see how long it takes him to figure out who we are. Oddly, this seems to have been better planned than the next part of our adventure.