More preparation and a new camera
We recently finished a trip to Las Vegas to see some family. For such a short trip – we were gone about a week – our backpacks were amazingly stuffed. We purposely packed as if we were going abroad, which meant taking a couple quart-sized bags stuffed with 3oz containers of fluid. We tried to prioritize: is it more important to have two travel-size contact solution bottles or one bottle and another of sunscreen lotion?
When we tried to pack up for our return trip, we realized that our bags were even harder to fill. Everyone knows this, but it’s easy to forget. Dirty clothes and haste make a bag 5-10% larger by volume, which makes packing annoying. This is something we’re going to take into account for our trip abroad, as we’ll essentially be re-packing almost every morning while we’re away. We need to be fast, keeping the process as painless as possible.
We took a day-trip out to Augusta from Atlanta, one of the most boring drives you can make. It was especially boring for me for a couple reasons: one was that I was suffering some sort of headache after a night of nausea, and another was that the landscape surrounding Las Vegas, which we had just seen, was a hundred times more variable and interesting than the walled-in, straight-line drive down I-20.
While in Augusta, we looked at a few rental homes and apartments. We found one we like, and we’re hoping the landlord didn’t screw up with thinking that the current tenants are leaving soon.
We also ordered a new camera for our trip. We’ve always taken two cameras on our vacations, usually our current camera and the one it replaced, which usually works fine besides being older and slower. Our trip hiking the Inca Trail taught us the importance of battery life, and we missed taking as many shots of Machu Picchu as we wanted.
We opted for a AA battery-powered camera as our co-camera this time. The Canon PowerShot A470 had great reviews, is rated at 7.1MP with a 3.4x optical zoom, and it takes two AA batteries, which we have plenty of. We can probably buy more abroad if we need to.
We hope it’s the perfect travel camera. We picked up a large box of AA batteries at IKEA a few months ago, and Target often has packs of AA’s for $1.