So now it's official. We for paid the majority of things last week, and I'm popping across to pay the balance today, which will lock in everything, dates and all.
In just on 3 months, we're heading out on our New World Tour. Aus -> Tokyo -> New York -> Cincinnati -> Las Vegas -> LA -> Pacific Coast Highway -> San Fran -> Home. 4 weeks of airports, jetlag and customs officers. Should be a blast!
The trip consists of mainly 2 or 3 days at each place - our plan is to see a little bit of a lot of places, so I expect it to be a bit hectic, but we should come back with a lot of memories, and get to experience a huge variety of places and landscapes. From winter in NY, to the desert in Vegas, and the massive metropolis that is LA.
Amongst all the tourist things, we've got a week in Cincinnati with Warren and Angie - hopefully they won't get sick of us half way through and turf us out! I'm really looking forward to seeing them again, since it's been 2+ years since we last had a chance to get together. After having seen photos of their house in the snow it'll be great to (hopefully) experience it ourselves! It's going to be friggin' freezing! Especially since we'll be leaving 30+ degrees tropical wet season weather!
Some, of course, would question the sanity of booking in a trip such as this when our dollar is at a 15 year low compared to the greenback. About all I can say to that is, "D'Oh!". It certainly wasn't planned, but it's just how it's worked out. Hopefully it will recover soon, so that we'll actually be able to afford to spend some money over there.
In preparation for the trip, we splurged this weekend on a new video camera. It's one of these:
Samsung VP-HMX20C Full HD SD-Card Camcorder
Engadget HD - review of Samsung SC-HMX20 Camcorder (US version)
No photos of it yet, but it looks exactly like the ones shown above, so there's little point. So far about all we've done is charge it up and muck with it a bit. I can't work out it's bundled video editing software (PowerDirector), but the playback of the full-HD video in Quicktime is just amazing. It records in a higher resolution than my 20" widescreen monitor can ramp up to, so it's really quite breathtaking. I wanted something that was pretty future-proof, and I think we got it with this one.
All we need to do now is grab a couple of 32Gb SDHC cards, and we'll be set. It has 8Gb of memory inside the camera, which will record about 70mins at Full HD (and top quality), so between that and a couple of cards we should be right. Will also mean that I don't need to take my laptop with us to download the footage if we take too much (like a HDD camera), as we can just pick up additional SD cards while we're travelling.
Now, all I need to do is talk Jessica into buying a good still camera, and I'll be in gadget heaven! I've finally accepted that the Canon EOS 450D is probably out of my price range, and not so practical to cart around overseas. I must admit I'm closely following the new Panasonic G1, which is meant to be coming out soon, and if the price is right I may splurge on one of them. If not, I still have a soft-spot for the Canon SX10IS, and he'd certainly be the most sensible option.
So that's that. We're both really looking forward to the trip, especially the chance to see Warren and Ange again. Now we've got 3 months of double-checking passports, investigating Japanese and American customs laws, trying to learn some basic Japanese words, trying to find out baggage limits... :)
