The state we are in.

Greetings and welcome once again to the unpredictable world of a 3JD blog update.

I feel that we are long overdue a general status update and also that I have been rather lax in my blog writing duties...

There is now less time remaining before we leave than there will be time spent on our journey (39 days left until we embark on a 52 day adventure). This is a rather sobering, somewhat terrifying and really quite exciting thought.

As the 23rd of July hurtles closer so too does 3JD shuffle slowly towards a state of near organisation and preparedness, I fear that our limping gait may never bring us quite all the way to a perfectly prepared state, but then I suppose that not knowing what to expect is where a lot of the fun of this journey will come from!

Our general absence from this blog can be mostly explained by how insanely busy we have all been in recent months! It turns out there's rather a lot of bureaucracy to wade through and work to be done when you're planning to pack up your lives and set off across a third of the world, raise some sponsorship, generate a little bit of media attention and of course raise a whole lot of money for some rather excellent charities. It's been a great process so far but has left us all with little time for anything else whilst balanced with our individual jobs or uni work.

That said, there have been several interesting developments to the 3JD situation lately!

I will start off with the bad news that has recently rocked the 3JD world: That Dwayne Doherty will no longer be able to join us on this noble venture. This major tragedy comes due in equal measure to the complications of acquiring visas in a troubling world and to Dwayne's insuppressible employability. 

So there you have it; one of the progenitors of the 3JD name will no longer be joining the team on our journey. This is sad news, especially when considering it was Dwayne's near boundless enthusiasm for the rally that spurred us all on in the first place. Still we can be thankful that Dwayne has helped a great deal in getting us this far and rest assured that he is going on to fairly epic adventures of his own! (there's no way we'd let him leave the team for an office job in Slough....)

On the upside, Dwayne's departure has freed up a seat in the car and the doors of 3JD team recruitment have been flung wide open (or rather left quietly ajar). We are hoping to fill Dwayne's seat at least as far as Iran and hopefully we can announce 3JD's newest member soon!

Another positive note is that, thanks in no small part to the insane generosity of Jordan Bradbury's family, our fundraising efforts for Children's Hospices UK and The Christina Noble Children's Foundation have been going rather well! We're now at a combined total of just over £1,000 And would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who has donated so far. We would of course also be delighted with any fresh donations which can be made here or here.

                              

Finally we've now got a few of our visa applications approved, with the rest hopefully following suite very soon! Today we have been issued with our official Iranian invites so we will be making a trip up to London in the next few weeks to hand over our fingerprints to the Iranian embassy and secure the final part of that visa (no doubt a fun filled and suitably lengthy blog post will follow documenting our time spent in the embassy waiting room). Our noble steed has also recently scraped through it's MOT (after a two page long list of failures) thanks in no small part to a rather sizable discount from Horizon Suzuki Garage in Poole. Along with the amazingly generous support from our sponsors we are now considerably closer to being ready for this thing than we were a few weeks ago!

Keep your eyes on the horizon blog readers, for more news from 3JD will be with you shortly (possibly).