Anyone paying attention to the dates on the rally site blog posts and with capacity for some basic mental arithmetic will have noticed that we only started fundraising four months before we left for Mongolia. That may seem like quite a short time period to try and raise the money in. You'd be right.

You may also wonder at the lack of mention of a vehicle, equipment, route planning, visas and so on - all essential items to tick off the list to be ready to rock for July the 10th. You may think that the absence of any of these things from updates so far would suggest nothing had been done about them. Again, you'd be spot on.

We signed up for the rally in August 2009, and paid the balance of the entrance fee on my 32nd birthday in October 09. From then until March 2010, all we'd managed to do was lose a team member, decide on a team name and raise £300 sponsorship, as a result of sending of one email and a Facebook post.

Organised, we were not.