After getting back from San Marino and Vatican City I thought i'd hit the milestone of my fortieth country but then noticed i'd listed Belgium twice. Don't you hate it when that happens?

At the end of July we'll be heading over to Greece (#40) and in October to Ireland (#41).

For my 40th birthday Jane has arranged that we'll fly to the Largo in Los Angeles see Jon Brion play. Though I got the great gift in April 2012, we will be too busy until 2013. I do wonder whether we could extend the trip and take in some of the states i've yet to visit. As awesome as it'll be it won't get me any closer on the fifty by fifty front, so...

Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia were all quite close by when we were driving through Eastern Europe in late 2011 but there just wasn't time. Rather than drive from England this time I think we'll fly into Bosnia and hire a car. The main issue is whether we'll be able to drive the hire car across all of the borders. I'm pretty sure getting into Kosovo would be a no no (or definitely getting again) so we'll have to skip that. If we can bag those four then that'd take the tally up to 45.

Our next BigPlan(tm) is to drive across Australia in 2014 and take in all six states (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, and Western Australia) and both territories (Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory). A territory is basically any land which falls outside of one of the states.

We're not sure whether we'll hire a camper van and sleep in the back of that or just stop at hotels. It's not clear at this very early planning stage whether a camper van would be good to drive in some of the more remote areas.