Spoilers, sweetie...!

I don't think I can remember the last time I was this happy to see a Friday! It's been an insanely busy week in work and with evenings spent bashing out corporate begging letters and status-bombing Facebook to generate some sponsorship it feels like I haven't stopped.  Things are really starting to move on the fundraising front now though so it's all been worthwhile, and we're going into the weekend feeling for the first time that maybe - maybe - we might be able to pull this crazy venture off after all.

Within a week and a half of setting up our JustGiving page we've raised a whopping £240, which is just fantastic.  I've been really touched by people's generosity - we've not had a huge number of donations as yet but some of the amounts have been pretty jaw-dropping and we're so grateful.  Hopefully it'll continue in the same vein; £240 is a cracking start but it's still only 3% of our target so we've a long old way to go yet.

Event planning is starting to come together too.  Plans are afoot for a series of quiz nights at local pubs and details will be published here as soon as we have confirmed dates.  And if you're in Chester town centre on 22nd June, be sure to keep an eye out for us - we've linked up with www.ukcharityaid.com, whose singers will be entertaining Chester's shoppers on our behalf (weather permitting!) while we do the rounds with our big yellow Marie Curie collecting buckets.  If we're lucky we might even get a guest performance from local child actor/singer Charlotte Dowson - if you haven't seen her before you'll be amazed, she's definitely one to watch for the future!

There's another big event in the planning which we're super-excited about - I'm not allowed to say anything yet and it's killing me!  Believe me, though, it's frightfully good and you'll love it as much as we do; in fact, I'd go as far as to say that people will be dying to sign up!  (I might not be allowed to say anything but that doesn't mean I can't drop hints.)  Like our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/roadtorongai to stay up to date with the latest developments - you don't want to miss out on this one!!

- Jo x

We ain't too proud to beg...

Well, there's no backing out now! The registration form has gone in, the JustGiving page is up and running and we're now officially a part of Team Liverpool. And we have our first online donation - yay!! Big thanks to the lovely Corinne Ellis for breaking our fundraising duck :)

The first (sober and focused) fundraising meeting is scheduled for Sunday so we should have a draft strategy in place by the end of the day with a rough programme of events to go with it. That's the theory, anyway. The bottle of White Zinfandel in my fridge is strictly for post-meeting relaxation purposes and I'm NOT going to spend the afternoon searching the Internet for pretty hiking boots. Honest.

Speaking of boots, though, we had out first sight of the kit list yesterday. Bloomin 'eck!! If Cotswold Outdoor and Boots The Chemist ever merged this is what their annual stock inventory would look like. Looking at it, we need at least £1,000-worth of gear each, and obviously this will come from our own pockets and not the fundraising pot. Eeeek! So, this is an early lesson for us in the need to put all pride aside when it comes to charity trekking, as we're forced to plead: if you happen to have a spare anything-whatsoever-to-do-with-hiking-in-equatorial-or-arctic-conditions that you'd care to donate to our cause, please let us know!

- Jo x

The road to the Rongai starts here

It's hard to believe that three months have passed since my friend Tamsin and I first agreed that we'd sign up to climb Kilimanjaro for the Marie Curie Hospice Liverpool.   Our current donation total stands at £50...only another £7,950 to go!   It's a daunting thought, particularly as neither of us have ever attempted fundraising on this scale before.  We have plenty of ideas; it's just the manifestation of them that's proving difficult, and the fact that our fundraising strategy meetings have thus far consisted of drinking two-for-one cocktails, moaning about men and coming away with little more than three illegibly scribbled bullet points and a hangover probably hasn't helped. 

 

Dendrohyrax. Not officially a laxative but I guess you don't know til you try.

To be fair, though, the whole venture has seemed unreal to me up until now; I'm pretty severely asthmatic so I purposely didn't get my hopes up until my doctor had confirmed that I was fit to take part.  But, after a two month battle of wills with the Paperwork Gestapo at the surgery, I am finally in possession of a completed Kilimanjaro registration form with with the medical declaration section duly signed by my African GP who, after all my fretting, barely glanced at the form before weilding the rubber stamp that said I was good to go.  He did warn me not to let the local trek guides trick us into eating Dendrohyrax, though. I thought perhaps it was a laxative but Google informs me that it's actually like a rabbit-sized rat, and I'm not sure which thought worries me more!

So, with paperwork in hand, Tam and I will be off to an official meeting at the hospice next week at which we'll hand in our registration forms and make the first payment to secure our places on the trek. I'm hoping they'll be able to give us some guidance about fundraising as well as letting us know a bit more detail about what we're letting ourselves in for.  The momentum is building and Project Kili is green for go - the Road to the Rongai starts here!