Twenty-five to go, with giggle fits

I haven't been able to get much nap time in today. I only slept about six hours last night (nerves? caffeine? who knows?) and tried to set my head down about two hours ago. And I couldn't do it. I kept staring at the cardboard Ikea boxes on top of the cupboard and I lasted about twenty minutes before I pulled them down and started to practice packing. Which is kind of dumb because a) the rest of the clothing and footwear from Salomon Sports won't arrive until next week; and b) because I live in a very small apartment. How small, you say? Twenty-one, count 'em, twenty one square metres. No McMansions for this cyclepath. Which is probably just as well, because if I had the money to get a McMansion, God only knows how much cycling stuff I would get on the way.

But now the nerves are starting to set in. The moon is starting to wane, and the next time we have a full moon, I'll be in the Basque Country, drinking txakoli and eating my face off. The thought of being able to finally go and do this is making me smile harder than anything. This is freakin' frightening, to be honest. Candy and I went out for coffee this morning and I was telling her that it's like not being able to decide whether I should scream joy from the roofstops, or hide in my closet from Easter until May Day. I know that I'm not going alone; I'll be accompanied by Andrew, a buddy of my best buddy's brother. So there's going to be some male companionship as well. But half of me just wants it to be Palm Sunday, and half of me would love to beg for another three weeks to get stuff done. I don't know where we stand with the route-marker stickers. I never got around to having the bookmarks made. Trans-Iberian jerseys? I could only wish. And this is basically just organizing a trip for ONE PERSON to do - not fifty or five hundred. How the hell do the organizers of multi-day, multitude events get things done?? (Dumb question, natch: They don't do every single, stupid, niggly detail themselves.)

Here's the funny thing, though. The more I start getting really scared, the more people start pitching in to help. At the beginning, people volunteered to help, but in the end, an awful lot of them flaked out or didn't even bother to return calls or e-mails. But now that it's getting closer, so many people are starting to pitch in and do small but effective things without being asked. María Luisa from Onda Cero is going to do a story on the trip for Onda Cero Córdoba. Fernando stepped in and contacted the printers' for an estimate on the labels. Julián and Gon went over the Spanish version of the handbook and provided opinions. Stuart and Jools have offered to put me up for a night or two in Ordizia, on the way up to providing they're not going out of town themselves during Easter. And Pilar's put an abbreviated version of the press release out to the other members of the ConBici biking organizations, which will hopefully motivate more people to join us.

So...slowly but surely it's getting there.

Slowly being a matter of opinion and perception, naturally.