Welcome

Well it's less than a week before Wendy and Richard begin their Born to Run 2008 tour.
We stole the tour name from Bruce Springsteen's classic - Born to Run - one of the only rock songs ever written about a girl called Wendy.
The real Wendy was saving to go on a big international trip when she met the boy, Richard a few weeks before Christmas in 1980. They fell in love, and got married 12 months later...and of course Wendy decided to postpone the trip. Now three children, many churches, several university degrees, a couple of dogs, countless houses and nearly three decades later we are finally making this 91 day - 14 country world tour.

Our inspirations have been many:
1. The Bible is full of wonderful adventure stories and the God we love made this world and all its people.
2. We were inspired by the following books - Jackie Hartnell, No Fixed Address - who gave us the idea that we could be middle aged backpackers and Tiana Templeman's book, Absolutely Faking It - who gave us the idea to use 'around the world' tickets and follow the path to South America, New York, Europe and finally Asia on the way home. Wendy has been reading the travel shelf for many years and her ideas and enthusiasm form the brains and heart of this trip.
3. We both loved Ewen McGregor's Long Way Round and Long Way Down so I (Richard) decided our trip had to have a name, thus... Born to Run was created.
4. We are indebted to our wonderful travel agent Lois Job who did the impossible and turned a pile of visa card points into two free around the world frequent flyer tickets - thanks also to QANTAS!

We leave on Monday 14th April 2008 and hope that you will follow our blog and track our progress all the way around this wonderful world.