It’s just under 2 hours until my cab picks me up to take me off to the airport, where I will embark on what is likely to be the biggest adventure so far in my life.

I fly to Cape Town this evening, the journey taking approximately 12 or so hours, hopefully I’ll score an emergency exit seat to get a little extra leg room!

It’s about 5 degrees here today, tomorrow I will be in CT where the forecast is for sunshine and a temperature in the region of 30-34, gonna be quite a contrast!

Anyway I will bid you all adieu for now, and the next time I post to the blog will be on South African soil!

So it is one day to go until I head off on the plane to Cape Town. I had my leaving drinks on Friday, down at a place called Bunker Bar in Covent Garden. Had a great time and was really nice to get all my mates together for a few drinks and a catch up.

It’s gonna be funny being away from everyone I care about for the next 3 or 4 months, but I am sure there will be new opporunities and experiences to be had, and of course, it is only 2 days until I buy my new surf board, so that is gonna be a new experience in itself. Mitch will soon have a little brother, haha!

Cheers all!

Well it’s been a pretty manic month in terms of work. I have managed to design, develop and launch 4 web sites in the past 23 days, 2 of which included custom-bulit content management systems, the other 2 being powered by WordPress.

• fraochmarketing
• McKinlay Kidd weblog
• Violent Music
• Adviance Technical Solutions

So now I’ll hopefully be winding down from here on in, starting to organise travel bits and bobs, and generally getting psyched up for this mammouth trip that awaits me.

Now this is class, although the mullet has seen a resurgence over recent years, you can’t beat a classic USA mid-westerner, stuck in a time warp sporting a gross old skool mullet!

Mullets-r-us

One week today and I will be stepping on a plane to start my 3.5 month round-the-world surf trip. First stop Cape Town, pick up a new board and then rip it up on the Atlantic coast.

3 more trips to the gym and should be all ready to go!

Out on Friday night to say goodbye to all my mates in London, a few beers to be had me thinks!

Found out today that the ASP Pro Tour is heading to Bells Beach, Australia the same time as I am going to be there. No it doens’t mean I will be entering (on this occasion) haha, but it does mean I will be able to hopefully catch some of the world’s top surfers doing their stuff.

Would be great to get some of the guys to sign my board(s), we’ll see! Only 9 days now, now that is hardcore, not long till I am back where I belong, sitting on my board, out back, contemplating life in the green room (my office away from home).

It was my best bud’s bday yesterday, we all went out for a bit of a meal at Pizza Express and then on to that shit hole JR’s. I managed about 45 minutes there, then had to get out, on the basis that the music is like pollution to my ears.

Then embarked on the 4 mile walk back home. Was kinda interesting, I had my iPod to keep me company, and it was a clear night, so the stars and moon cast blue light on the fields. It was a bit spooky and also beautiul at the same time.

Anyway best crack on with some work…

Had my jabs today, the full montey: Polio, Typhoid, Diptheria, Tetanus and Hep B. Now feeling like someone has given me a bit of a beating to the upper arms… nice!

Well it’s now 11 days until the tour, and things are progressing nicely, should have all my projects out of the way by mid next week, good stuff!

Not sleeping too well at the moment though, which is a bit of a pain in the posterior. 1001 things flying through my mind: surfboards, sharks, pay disputes, coding, site design, my little bro, and a certain Aussie chick…

Talking of Aussie chicks, I found some cool abstract paintings today from a Sunshine coast artist called Sharon Stone (not to be confused with the US actress).

Anyway enough crap for one evening, it’s time to live that rock ‘n’ roll dream and go munch on some revells over a cup of hot chocolate… keeping it oh so real, haha!

Yep you guessed it, another post about the countdown to the surf tour, oh well, what can ya do! So anyway less than two week’s now and really trying to tie things up workwise by the end of this week.

My mate Sulli passed me over some pictures of some nice retro fish surfboards that his friend in HK makes. They look sweet as, and I think him and I will be purchasing one each for Bali. As they said in the Field Of Dreams, “If you build it they will come”. It’s all about building the quiver (of boards).

To those who know him, the Mighty Mitch (of Fuerte’ and numerous UK surf outings) has to stay dry for this tour. At 8′2″ he is just too damn big to take on tour, and so he stays landlocked until we head down to Devon and Cornwall later on in the year.

Thoughts for this tour in terms of board size are to go smaller, somewhere in the 7′ range, a combination of mini-mal and short board styles me thinks, something that gives you the stability of a mal, but the slick turns of a short board. Cape Town will be the first stop and it’s here where I will make the first purchase, can’t wait!

As the old boy says on Blue Horizon, “Think it, feel it, do it”.

13 days!

Freshly back from the gym and about to tuck into a pizza, I managed to give myself the mini-fear today thinking about sharks and other nasties in the sea.

Statistically I am more likely to get struck by lightening or something, but that still doesn’t help. It’s different when you surf mainly in the UK, as I find I just don’t think about that kinda thing when I’m hanging out in the green room on my board. But most of the places I am visiting on my tour have plenty of stuff in (and out of) the sea to put me straight to the bottom of the food chain!

Well hopefully this time next year it will be stories of the stoke, rather than stories from a one legged surfer.

Anyway that oven is beaping again so it’s time to go and get some tucker!

Yep today has been hardcore, started coding at 08.45 this morning, and am still going, and it’s 19.25. I am working on a project for one of my clients in Scotland.

The thing is, there comes a time in every website’s lifespan that you look at the code you wrote 2 or 3 years ago and know you have to update it, otherwise you end up patching more and more. I’ve just finished updating the site’s framework to a nice, tasty OOP PHP model, which should make it easy to update in the future.

All good!

Had a nice chat to a certain lady from down under this morning, gave me the focus for the day!

19 days until the tour starts!