On the Road with the Eee PC

I'm off on a ten-day trip to London, Toronto and Ottawa. I'm visiting friends in London, seeing friends and family and hopefully doing some Big Trip shopping in Toronto, and attending a conference in Ottawa.

I'm looking at this as an excellent chance to try out a bunch of Big Trip related gear, including the Eee (on which I am composing this right now, quite comfortably). I'm also bringing a lot of the clothing I plan to travel with, and I'm in possession of a new MP3 player, the Creative Zen Stone Plus with speaker (more on this in a separate post). Because this trip will include three cities in ten days, and feature travel by air, train and public transit it should be a decent test of everything from luggage and clothing choice to on-the-road laundry, internet access and footwear.

The bag I'm traveling with on this trip is the eBags Weekender Convertible, purchased online for $74.87 from eBags.com. In this context, convertible means that it can be carried by a handle like a suitcase, but also has stow-away straps that convert it to a backpack. I've also added a shoulder strap that gives a third option. I bought this particular bag because I was keen to get my hands on a convertible carry-on sized bag and the price was right. I'm skeptical that the eBag has the wherewithal to stand up to the rigors of 12 months of heavy-duty traveling, but for my purposes right now, it's sufficient. I'll write a detailed post about my top luggage contenders at another time, but my current picks are the Rick Steves Convertible Carry-on and the Tom Bihn Aeronaut.

I'm also carrying a day-pack that I'd hoped to fit in to the eBag so that I would truly be one-bagging but logistically that seemed tricky. I need to figure out a way to have a small daypack packed with on-the-plane essentials that will fit in the carry-on, but be quickly and easily extracted once on the plane. What prevented me from doing that today was the fact that the daypack seemed a bit bulky to be crammed into the eBag. More research is required.

I tried to weigh my luggage this morning - including the eBag and the daypack - using the highly scientific bathroom-scale method, and it looked like my total luggage weight was about 28 lbs. This is far too much – I'm hoping to be near or under 20lbs in total. Later I weighed the eBag alone with a luggage scale at the travel gadget store in the airport, and it was about 22lbs. I'd really like to get a proper luggage scale for testing all this out. More research is required.

While I'm in Toronto I'm hoping to hit the Tilley store to pick up 3-4 pairs of their “Unholey” travel socks (guaranteed for 3 years, and light enough to dry overnight!). I'll also look at convertible pants and collared shirts. My other big quest is for the perfect pair of shoes. Ideally I'd find a single pair of shoes that is comfortable enough to wear all day, every day, and that's also waterproof (or very quick-drying), and dressy enough for a dinner out, and rugged enough to take on safari or to hike the Inca Trail. A tall order indeed.

In case it's not abundantly clear by now, one of the things I'm really enjoying about planning this trip is figuring out exactly what gear to bring, and how to pack it. There's really nothing I like better than a good bit of planning, and the next ten months are going to be all about planning. Stay tuned for posts about all the various bits of gear, clothing, and luggage that I'm planning on taking.

Six Things I am Allowed to Buy

Once I conceived this big plan for house-selling, stuff-storing and world-traveling, two things became clear. First: this is going to be expensive, and second: I have a lot of stuff. Therefore, I've instituted a rule that for the next year I'm only allowed to spend money on the following things:

1. Consumables - food (groceries and restaurant meals), gas for the car, toiletries, running shoes (Non-runners may not understand that this belongs in "consumables", but runners will agree right away.), gels, Bodyglide, beer...
2. Immediate but unforeseen needs - perhaps the water heater gives out, or the car needs new struts (ok, that's actually a foreseen need since I've been warned about it already, but you get the idea)
3. Gifts for other people
4. Items that do not occupy physical space (movie tickets, DVD rentals, race registrations, hockey fees, iTunes downloads, massages, etc... this is a gratifyingly open category)
5. Items related to fixing up the house for sale.
6. Items directly related to the trip - gear, clothing, travel agency fees, tickets, guide books, laser eye surgery (Ok, this is a stretch, but the trip was my motivation for taking the plunge.)

Note: mortgage, property taxes, utilities, home and car insurance, investments, etc.. are not included in the ban. I'm really talking about discretionary spending here. And about not accumulating more stuff that will just have to be stored, sold, given away or abandoned.

A test post, sent by email.

This post was composed in Gmail and emailed for posting directly to my blog. I have also attached a photo to the message. I wonder what will happen?

The Tiniest Computer!

I am writing this post on my new Asus Eee PC (2GB Surf), received for FREE (thank you Royal Bank!). It's the most base model, but is meant to give me a (FREE) preview of the general category of devices from Asus, and let me knock about with the Linux operating system, and generally see if this type of device is worthy of pack-space on my big trip. So far I like it, though I haven't been able to connect to the wireless network in the office (I'm connected to the LAN right now).

If I do take an Eee PC with me, it will most likely be this one. It has the same diminutive form factor (a mere 9" wide x 6-1/2" deep x 1-1/2" thick), but has a bigger screen, 20GB of memory, and (supposedly) better battery life. They seem to be worth about $600 on eBay right now, but I hope that as more newer models are introduced, that price may come down. I won't be buying anything until the new year.

The other big thing I need to decide is whether to go with the Linux, or with the Windows XP version. Part of the reason for getting the (FREE) 2GB model was to have a chance to test-drive the operating system. If all goes well, Linux may be the smarter choice.

Oh, and did I mention it was FREE?!

Blog 101

In case you're not familiar with blogs, here's an overview of how mine works: What you're reading right now is a single post called "Blog 101". The blog is made up of lots and lots of these posts which I'll write and publish on a semi-irregular schedule. There will be links which are highlighted like this. Click on them and you'll be directed away from the post to somewhere else. Click your browser's "Back" button and you'll come back here.

There will be photos like the one in the top left. If you click on the photos you'll be taken away from the blog to my Flickr page where you can see a better quality copy of the photo, download it if you want, and look at all my other public Flickr photos.

There might even be embedded videos, like this one I took waiting in the starting corral of the 112th Boston Marathon. Click on the play button and it should start playing (if your browser is compatible, and you had enough bandwidth to load it when the page loaded, and the various other gods of the internet are smiling on you). I'm not sure how often I'll post videos - they take a long time to upload to the blog, and there will be many instances when my internet connection won't be fast enough for this. Enjoy them when you get them. Videos are special.

At the bottom of each post there's a link you can click on to add a comment on that post. It's hard to miss - it says "Post a Comment". Click there and a new window will pop open where you can say things like, "Hey Pam, it sounds like you're having a great time in Morocco. Things here are great too, except it's been raining for 2 weeks and my canoe is leaking..." Please send lots of comments, it turns this blog into a two-way medium instead of just my lonely cry in the dark.

At the very top of the page is the black Blogger Bar (say that five times fast...). If you enter a search term in the box and click on "Search Blog", it'll show all the posts with your search term in them.

Next is the beautifully crafted Go See Run Eat Drink header image, which my friend Phonella and I spent many many hours on, so please take a moment to really look at it. It's quite lovely. Click anywhere on it and you'll be taken to the most recent post.

Just under the lovely header image is a menu bar with a bunch of buttons you can click on:

• "Home" will take you to the most recent post.
• "Welcome" will bring you to the first post - "Welcome to Go See Run Eat Drink".
• "Blog 101" will bring you back to this post.
  
• "Maps" will take you to the Google maps of my trip.
• "Running Log" will take you to a spreadsheet detailing my running while I'm traveling.
• "Links" will take you to a post with links to a lot of my favourite travel related websites.

Along the right hand side is the appropriately-named "sidebar". It's got:

• My profile, with a little blurb.
• My count-down clock, which is counting down to my estimated day and time of departure. Once I leave, it'll start counting up - keeping track of how long I've been on the road.
• A tiny window into my Google map. You can pan and zoom inside this little window without even leaving the blog! Cool!
• ADDED JUNE 5, 2009: "Last Known Location" - which will tell you the last place I was when I remembered to update you with the last place I was.
  
• The Archives, where you can check out all my past posts. Click on the little triangle arrow to expand or collapse the archives for each month.
  
• The Tag Cloud, which is an interactive view of all the different labels I've assigned to different posts. The more times a label has been used, the bigger it appears in the Tag Cloud. Click on any one of those words and you'll be taken to a page containing all the posts with that label.
• My Flickr badge, with an ever-changing random selection of photos from my Flickr page. Click on any of those little pictures to go to the Flick page for that photo. Click on the text at the bottom of the badge to go to the main page for all my photos.

At the very bottom is the fine print, and an inspirational quote. There's also an image of my email address. It's not click-able. You'll have to actually remember it and type it into a message. This is so that nasty web-crawling spiders can't read my email address off the blog and inundate me with spam while I'm busy trying to upload photos, check my email, or watch Youtube videos of cute puppies or people attempting to jump over piles of derelict cars on skateboards.

And that's it. You're now fully educated in the architecture of my blog, so click around and check it out.

And thanks for coming.