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On our next holiday

July 29th, 2009 - 3:42pm

For the third year in a row, we are both incredibly fortunate and lucky enough to be able to again travel to an overseas destination. This will bring our total time overseas to thirteen weeks in three years (2007-2009), or just over 8.3% of that time — it’s gone down from 9.6% in 2007-2008 and 13.4% in 2007.

This year, after to-ing and fro-ing between South America, Africa, Turkey, Hungary and a few other places, we finally agreed on visiting the USA. At first it certainly doesn’t seem as exotic a locale as any of the earlier suggestions — and, I suppose, it’s not really — but with fantastic destinations like New York (somewhere I have wanted to visit for longer than any of the places we’ve actually visited thus far), San Francisco and the visit-at-least-once-in-a-lifetime Las Vegas on our list we have a great few weeks ahead of us. It’s still over a month away but, as usual, we’ve been reading and scouring and planning for ages already.

Something I’m doing this time around is plotting the location of all of the activities, sights and other places we want to see using Google Maps. I’ve not done much of it yet but I’m hoping it will allow us to make better use of our time away by allowing us to see all of the things we want to see in a specific location rather than circling around aimlessly and revisiting locations when we don’t need to. Having lists of what we want to do has, in the past, made it possible to see a lot and not forget those things we might otherwise overlook while in a new and interesting place.

The trouble with such lists, though, is that it can prevent the thrill of discovering or doing something unexpectedly and that will definitely be a bit of a tightrope walk. However, we’ve done it pretty well in the past — usually we check off all of the things quickly and efficiently and then spend time aimlessly wandering. A combination I’ve enjoyed: how else do you end up at a fish massage joint?

We’ve also planned a few firsts into our trip. Neither of us have ever flown in a helicopter, and what better way to experience your first flight than flying over the Las Vegas strip, seeing the massive Hoover Dam and then landing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?

Our previous technology setup of digital SLR, point-and-shoot cameras, along with a large portable hard disk (unfortunately, the card reader/hard disk packed it in last year) and — last time at least — a netbook has worked well and I don’t see much reason to change that.

However, if all goes well, I am hoping to take an iPhone or Android-based phone (the decision of which is beginning to loom heavily) along with the purchase of a US prepaid SIM allowing inexpensive data usage. Using a smartphone will allow for location-based activities such as finding public toilets (a must!), and other places such as nearby places to eat. And when you can use something as cool as Wikitude, why not use that too?

We fly out on September 4th, a date rapidly and ever-faster accelerating towards right now.

Tags: dslr, fish massage, google, grand canyon, holiday, trip, usa 2009