The Misadventures of Pre-Travel Planning
October 25, 2009 by davendeb
Filed under Planetd News, Pre Trip Planning
It’s Monday, you know what that means. Time to tell you the mis-adventures of Dave and Deb preparing for India and how things are going at theplanetd.
Let me start by talking to you about our electronics. As many of you know, we bought and Iphone and are ready to use it to keep in touch during our travels. We made sure to buy one that is a little bit older because the software is easier to unlock. Or so we thought. Dave went through all of the steps to unlock the phone and we thought all was well.
That is until we put in our Sim card and didn’t get a signal.
After further investigation on the Internet, Dave discovered that the guy that sold him the phone updated the firmware for which there is no way to unlock. Can’t blame the guy, he thought he was being nice.
So now we have an Iphone, that cannot be unlocked at the moment. We have it up on Craigslist now and are hoping to sell it before buying an already unlocked phone. The good new is that at least we tried it here in Canada before leaving for India.
The next misadventure happened when we bought batteries for our new Panasonic GH1 Camera. We like to have 3 batteries. One came with the camera and then we bought an extra battery at the camera shop. But at 90 bucks a pop, we decided that one Panasonic battery was enough and we would buy a third party battery for our other back up battery. It is much cheaper and we have always used third party batteries for our cameras in the past and they have always worked fine. Not this time.
Yet again the bloody firmware came back to haunt us.
Panasonic updated this specific model so that you cannot use third party batteries. You have to use the Panasonic battery which is 3 times the price.
So now we are sitting with a battery that we cannot use and an iphone that we cannot use. Hey at least we don’t leave for 4 weeks.
On a positive note, we have sped up our site.
We hired a great guy once again from Scriptlance and he made our site 70% faster. We have noticed a huge improvement. He says that he has done all that he can for now, and the next step that we need to do is change hosts. Bluehost is too limiting for our site and we haven’t been thrilled with the amount that bluehost is down anyway. It seems that several times a week our site is down due to server problems.
We are considering changing as our term is expiring with bluehost in a couple of weeks, but it seem like a daunting task. He is suggesting we change to Host9.
Anyone else have some advice on servers and changing from one to another?
We still have to re-size our photos as well to speed it up even more. We uploaded way too big of files, so that is a task for Dave to do in the next couple of weeks. But for now, we are feeling pretty good with the loading time.
Other News…
We are going to be trying out some Microfiber Firm Support Travel Socks for our adventures and travels. It is always nice to be contacted to try out a product or two and we are going to put these socks through their paces. We let you know how they hold up as we hike and trek our way through Asia.
We developed some nice links this week too. Is it just me or is it the time of year? But we suddenly started receiving offers from companies to place ads and to do some nice link exchanges too. We assume that it must be because it is October. It is the beginning of the 4th quarter of the year, so people are updating their links and adspace.
The business of Blogging still baffles us, but we are slowly learning and with great friends out there sharing information, we are starting to catch on.
Last and probably least…
We seem to be doing well with checking off the to do list for our travels. We put everything in storage this weekend and for this last week in October we are living in an empty apartment sleeping on our memory foam mattress (on the floor) We still have our Internet and computers, so we will be fine. Oh and we kept our wine glasses out of storage for now so we got everything we need!
We have our Visa’s, our shots, our medications and we are completely. packed Our addresses are changed and forwarded, our banking is set and our insurance is confirmed.
It is funny though. Everything is falling into place and yet we both feel a little anxious and unsettled. I feel like there is a lot to be done, but really there isn’t. Actually, this week should be nice. I don’t have to worry about packing or making a tonne of phone calls. I don’t have a giant pile of things that need to be tackled and yet, I keep feeling like I have so much to do. It is difficult to adjust to suddenly having very little to do.
I actually think that I will be able to catch up on reading other people’s blogs, doing my lessons at MatadorU and finally doing some research on India and Sri Lanka.
It has been so crazy and hectic for the past couple of months, that it is going to be a welcomed change in the final weeks leading up to our travels to enjoy the company of friends and family and to slow down a bit and relax.
Wow!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed for latest posts via email or on your homepage!
