New Year New Adventures

A slightly belated Happy New Year to you All. We hope your festive break has been enjoyable and that 2026 holds lots of good things in store for you.

Well, just two years later than planned we have finally set off on our 'Big World Trip'. 2026 should see us passing through Europe, wintering it out in Turkey, then into the Caucasus in Spring (Georgia & Armenia), a speedy transit through Russia to get to the Central Asian Stans (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan) , then into Mongolia (reached by cutting across the NW corner of China), then leave Mongolia by a different border with China where we will drive through the centre of China for a month to reach Laos, then work our way down through SE Asia (Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia). By this point we hope we will have found a way to ship Lolly to Australia to continue our adventure in 2027. The actual route will be determined by the ever changing crazy geo-political situation and the opening and closing of borders in various countries, but this is our rough plan.

It's been a long route to get to this point - several test trips into Europe, moving house, lots of issues to sort on Lolly, including a few more recent ones involving the electrics which delayed our pre- Christmas planned departure date, then a problem getting new tyres which delayed our New Year departure, but we are excited to have finally set off knowing if we have any further issues we just have to deal with them on the road. The pre-trip planning and preparations will hopefully be the hardest and most stressful part of the trip as they were for our 3 year trip starting in 2005.

Since we came back from our Irish road trip we've been busy. We went out to Mallorca with our Hope Centre cycling group in September - after the epic cycle to Paris in 2024, this was very much about enjoying the fantastic cycling roads of Mallorca with a great group of people. The group still managed to raise £17,000 for the charity without the usual call-out to our generous sponsors.

We've tried to catch up with as many friends and family as possible, been to some football matches (Bolton - ok, sort of football) and rugby union matches (Northampton Saints and England), trips to the theatre in London and finally were treated to the amazing hospitality of Colin's sister Sara and brother in law Jovi in West Sussex for Christmas. Our first main port of call on this trip will be to visit them at their home in Belgrade.

We will be posting updates and photos on this blog regularly, but if you find these too lengthy to read in your busy lives, there are other ways you can follow our progress.

Polarsteps - we have been plotting the main places we have visited in Lolly (and by plane) since 2023. If you search for Elizabeth Watson on Polarsteps and our trip Zigzaggingtheworld you will see where we are and there will be a few photos loaded for each step.

Instagram - our Instagram account is zig_zaggingtheworld. We are going to try to post more photos and reels on this. Social media is an alien concept for us, so bear with us on our steep learning curve.

Both Polarsteps and the Instagram posts feed are on the Homepage of our blog and the Polarsteps map is also on the Route Maps page.

The Past Travels page has a copy of the book we self-published of our 2005-2008 three year trip through Africa, Asia and Central & South America.

The Updates page has all the blog updates that we've published since 2023 covering France, Spain & Portugal, Scandinavia, the Baltic States and Ireland. So plenty to read if you're having trouble sleeping at night.....

It is possible to leave comments at the end of each blog which we only recently discovered - nothing too abusive please!

See you in Serbia.