Trippin' Out

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... :)

My Home Theaters...

...Let me show you them.

So yeah, our main TV blew up a week and a half ago. That's the top of it you can see in the bottom-right corner of the photo, sulking on the floor in shame. All attempts to revive it have thus far failed. I'm not sure what's wrong with it - when powered up it will go into standby mode, and the little red light on the front will glow, but it won't actually go from that to turning on and being a useful TV.

So, until we can afford a new one, we scavenged the above replacement from Trev & Kelli's place, where it was performing the admirable duty of taking up space in the top of a cupboard in the spare room. Of course, I know what TV I'd like to replace it with, but unless someone gives me $2500 that they happen to find laying around, then this one will have to do for now. Luckily we still have the nice baby 26" LCD TV out in the living area. We were going to shuffle it out into the lounge room, and then put the little one out the front, but that ended up being too much mucking around.

Oh well - I guess we'll just have to see if we can up our credit limit on the ol' AGC card, and wait till someone has a "no deposit, no interest, no repayments" sale!!! Hooray for broken things!

PS - finally feeling better, after copious quantities of painkillers, a week of being in bed, a trip to the doctor, and a course of antibiotics.

Camping stuff - New shower tent

Ugh - still a bit sick from the flu that flattened me over the weekend. So no new exciting news. But I figured it had been too long since I'd put something up, so enjoy the following:

A couple of weeks back BCF was doing a special on shower packages. They bundled a shower tent with a solar shower and some foam floor tiles, and gave a little discount off the package price. Not a great deal of savings, but enough to make it worthwhile. A hot shower whilst out in the bush is a little luxury that we've been missing when we've been out, especially when you go camping with others who have various hot water shower setups, and you need to beg them for a go.

I'm not a huge fan of the solar showers, since you need a reasonable amount of sun to get the water warm, and you've got to remember to put the bag out early in the day, and so forth. But I figured that we would most probably use the shower bag with hot water that we had cooked up on the gas stove, so we just needed a way to hold the water up high, and a shower rose. We were originally looking at something along these lines: Camp Showers , but for $9, we couldn't go past the solar shower bag. Plus at least if it's a sunny day we can use the solar shower as it was originally intended.

But the exciting part of it (if you can get excited about any of this) is the shower tent. I didn't want a pop-up one, as they're annoying to pack up at the best of times, and because there's no rigid structure, there's no place to hang the solar shower. So you then need to set up either under a tree, or come up with some other solution to the problem. Luckily, the shower tent that came in the package was the exact one I've had my eye on - an OzTrail tent with a rigid external frame. It makes putting up/packing up a bit longer, but means we can suspend the solar shower bag from the top of the frame, and it will be strong enough to hold it.

We set it up in the backyard to test it all out, make sure we had received all the bits and pieces, and figure out the best way to put it up. So here's some photos. Best part is it all packs down to a really quite tiny bag, which will go up on the roofracks no problem at all. So all in all, I think it'll work out very well for us. Now, to get a free weekend where we can get away and try it out!