Kuwait trip!!

 Here are my grandparents Elspeth and Peter in 1953

This is them setting off for a very long drive to England from their home in kuwait. This is the route they took:
Kuwait- Iraq- Syria - Turkey - Greece - Macedonia -Kosovo - Montenegro - Croatia -Italy- Austria- Switzerland-  France - England.

For absolutely ever (and by this I mean approximately since 2008) Me and Dan have been talking about doing a similar trip also in a moris minor but in the other direction from England to Kuwait. One day a few years ago we got their travel diary and mapped it all out. The diary was written in quite a boring style with not much personality, but  here are 2 interesting bits I remember:
1) they only spent £40 on fuel for the whole trip!
2) My granny got touched up by a Turk.

We set a provisional date for our trip as Sept to Nov 2013 a while ago and then started looking into all the boring things you have to do before having fun these days. (I bet my grandparents didn't have to do any of this) Things like can you ship a car from Kuwait to England?  Can you sell give away or dump a car in Kuwait?  what visas do you need? How can you get around Syria/ Iraq? what insurance covers you everwhere in a 60 year old car? bla bla bla snore.

I found some answers to these questions but not really enough to make me feel confident about the trip. Much as I believe that as risk increases fun increases, I do also know that there is a point on the risk-fun graph where fun dramatically decreases and that is at the injury/death/ being totally stranded with no money point. If you look carefully at a map there really is no way to get to Kuwait from Europe without going through dangerous bits. Which is totally not fair because we thought of this idea before Syria had issues! Anyways to overcome a lot of the car related problems we have come up with this super duper new plan:

FOLDING BIKES
LYCRA
INTERAIL
HITCH HIKING
COUCH SURFING
CHEAP HOSTELS
MY DAD'S SAILING BOAT
SOME SHORT DISTANCE FLIGHTS THAT AVOID SYRIA

BOOM!

Sorry I got board with sentences there but you get the gist. Dan want's us to be able to comfortably cycle 60 miles a day, I'm not really motivated to exercise generally but if there's one thing I love it's bargainous transport (I have even been described  as a 'bargain Nazi'.) So that and sense of adventure is enough motivation for me to get into shape. I'm going to have to only take 3 or 4 outfits though and I can't even just think about which are my 3 or 4 top outfits, I'll have to think about practicalities : (  Boring! AND Dan says I'll have to wear padded crotch cycling shorts.

This is the route we will take: England- hopefully a sail boat to France- interail and bike all through europe to Turkey we haven't decided exact route yet- fly turkey to Lebanon (this is an unnecessary part of the trip but we both really want to go)- fly to Jordan (annoying that we have to fly but we can't go through Israel with an Lebanese stamp in out passports and we can't go through Syria)- go through a deserted areas of northern Saudi to reach our destination KUWAIT! and our new dates are 1st Aug - 30th Sept.

It's going to be epic!

p.s if anyone wants to live in our house rent free and just pay for bills for those dates let us know.