Last Update Before We Leave

Well, we have just two days to go before we leave, and everything seems to be coming together.  Hopefully we won’t have to worry about the two hurricanes in the Atlantic, Igor and Julia.  It is Julia that worries us, it seems to have a predicted path that bends more towards the USA at this time.  More worried about our “extra” house in Charleston, SC.  It might be more in the ultimate path of that storm.

We sorted through our clothes last night, weeding out the excess that we felt we did not need to take, and making sure we had a good diversified set of matching clothes.  We will go through another round of reductions again tomorrow night when we actually start packing our clothes into the luggage.  We have enough to do Wednesday night without worrying about packing on the last night; much more fun things like mowing the grass, cleaning the house, etc., before we leave on Thursday.

The iterative  approach we take  to packing seems to make it easier to reduce what we end up taking, we do it a little at a time, and let it mentally sink in.  That seems to be much easier than trying to make all of the reductions at one time.  We will put everything into the bags tomorrow night and then go for the big weigh-in.  That will probably mean another fourth and final round of reductions before we call it good.  Until you get EVERYTHING  into the suitcase, the toiletries, the make-up, the shoes, etc. it is just a guess on the final weight.   All of the computer and camera gear is already packed in the camera backpack.  Our goal is 45 lbs per bag, 5 lbs under the airline’s 50 lb. limit.

We have sorted through all of the material we will take with us for information.  We normally tear out sections of our guide books, and only take the sections for the places we plan to visit.  Another good reason to purchase inexpensive Rick Steve’s books through Amazon and Wal-Mart, we don’t feel bad about pulling them apart.  They are actually pretty easy to pull apart while keeping the sections we want to take intact.  Besides, we can bring them back and reuse them, some are already making their second trip.

Hopefully, we will have enough time to keep these posts up to date, but a lot will depend on internet access, both availability and on reliability/speed.  This will especially be true for loading any photos.  If we load our trip information in delayed spurts, that usually means we are still recovering from jet lag, are worn out from the days activities, have bad internet service, or, maybe all of the above.  We have the system set up so we can write and load the postings on local version on the small laptop.  So, if we have decent internet, service we can usually copy and paste the written postings into the real version that everyone sees here.  Pictures are a little more time consuming to sort through, reduce in size, and load up, so they are usually delayed in getting posted.

Well, this is all for now.  The next posting will probably be from our three hour  layover in Philadelphia on Thursday.