*cough* ahem. Hello?

2010. What a year that was. A year so packed full of joy and adventure that I managed to hit the blog a grand total of 56 times. Even by my lazy, can't-be-arsed standards, that represents something of a low.

What can I say? Rally prep went into overdrive around April time, and was an all-encompassing obsession by the time June arrived. We went, we saw, we came back, but then it was straight back into work and catching up with neglected friends, and before I knew it it was January the 1st all over again!

The months following our triumphant return from 110 degrees east also saw me wading through over 1800 photos and 2 hours of video from the trip, in an attempt to weed out the worthwhile memories from the out-of-focus thumb shots. I managed to get the photos fully uploaded to Flickr around the middle of December, and you can check 'em out here.

Likewise, I cobbled together a reasonable first effort at a short film of our highlights - by which I mean 'the parts of the trip where I remembered I had a camcorder with me'. It's viewable in the post below, and I lucked out somewhat both with the music working really well, and some of the edits almost looking slick. After all - it was my first attempt, and was using Windows Movie Maker, which isn't renowned for being particularly amazing. There is a helluva lot of room for improvement though, and my latest attempt to make a rally opus is currently beached on the soundtrack options. It's bloody hard to find the right sort of music that has a bit of meaning and works well with the footage it's playing over the top of. The mutterings on the film soundtrack itself are either non-existent or mediocre, boring mumbling, hence the need to make it more of a musical endeavour. I'm plugging away though - I won't stop until I'm happy with it. It's kinda nice to get home and tinker with the footage, in the absence of a driveway and clapped out motor.

I'm going to re-post our updates from the road here for posterity, just in case something goes tits up with the rally website. I also hope to expand on the short, SMS-length posts we did whilst we were away, but that fully depends on my 33-year old memory helping me out with the finer points of our 5 week expedition (now over 6 months ago), and me having a bit more commitment to clogging up the internet version of the airwaves than was displayed last year.