The start!

 Welcome to our blog!  This marks the first entry in the story of our journey to Ulaanbataar next July/August (we hope or we will all become unemployed if we get stranded).

 Well, the team has been finalised:  Dan Fidock, Jason Adcock and Harsha Siddaveere in the car, and Mark Lewis and Paul Taylor in the back office. The planning has begun in earnest (well, we’ve had a couple of meetings at the pub after work and sent a few emails, to be honest …).

We’ve settled on our charities, these being the official charity for the rally, Christina Noble Foundation, along with our nominated charity – [The Mercy Centre](http://www.mercycentre.org/), run by Father Joe out in Bangkok. The Mercy Centre also has a branch in the UK and they are quite excited by the prospect of the team’s commitment to fundraising during the lead-up to the rally.

Our main accomplishment to date has been Dan and Jason attending an Adventurists-endorsed Extreme Survival Medical course, which was held a few weekends ago in Hereford, with a whole bunch of ex-SAS medicos who of course insisted on action-based learning in evening temperatures of around -10 celsius …. gotta love it! In fact, the lads enjoyed it so much and they expect to be stars in the upcoming ‘youtube’ production that the Adventurists filmed over the weekend.  Dan and Jason are looking forward to royalties LOL ….. all to go to charity naturally.  We’ll send out a link as soon as it’s up on the net.

We expect to have the web site up before the festive break and will be asking everyone to dig deep for our chosen charities … in fact we’ll be asking numerous times until the end of the rally! To be clear, none of the charity money will go towards our preparations/costs – we are self funding that – so it literally will all go to the kids and communities (both in Mongolia and Bangkok).

 More soon