Welcome to day minus-one of the Slightly Ill-prepared Mostly Eastern Europe adventure.

Here's the theory:

• Travel, via the methodology of the wonderously abysmal British railway system, to Manchester airport.
• Acquire massive amounts of free food and drink samples.
• Try not to get groped more than, say, you do queuing in the men's queue at Club Vibe, during whatever magical enhanced security the airport will no doubt insist on having as a result of (supposedly) Al Qaeda's embarrassing driving a car into a billboard incident the other week. Board plane.
• Get to Budapest. Enter a cheap hotel. Live life.
• Go to Novi Sad, Serbia to participate in the it-should-be-awesome State of Exit festival.
• Return via Budapest to UK. Recover for a few seconds. Go to Copenhagen for a couple of days; 1 work (boo), 1 less so (yay).
• Return home. Sleep for days.

Exciting eh? There are, however, small practical problems. For instance:

• Presently we have no way of travelling from Budapest to Serbia.
• We have more nights in Budapest / Serbian lands than actual nights accommodation booked.
• To my knowledge, none of us can speak a word of any of the languages involved.
• I have not begun to pack yet, and don't really know how to start.

Still there's a few minutes left til bedtime and I have at least found my passport. Packing for a holiday must be the same as packing for a night away from home, but just on a bigger scale. I've been lent an audio cassette of the language. How could this possible be anything other than a massive smooth sailing success?

The excitement belongs here then. Stay chooned to da blog then to see what, if anything, transpires...

NB: Secret experiment - can we sell our beloved Kat for a price of over a million camels or two ships? Ssssh!