So, to my double surprise:

1. A few of you have been asking if The Bassman will be blogging about our upcoming trip, and …

2. I opened up the blog and the last entry was exactly one year ago (tomorrow).

New Jersey, July 19 – All my bags are packed, and I’m ready to go

I guess the excitement of our last trip, the excitement of our national political discourse, and the excitement of what’s been going on in our household have kept me out of the blogosphere.

In case you missed it, I/we missed the spring this year. Sally broke her ankle in March, which resulted in her loving husband providing 24×7 nursing and home care. This effort was compounded (1) by our decision to renovate our ground-floor bedroom, requiring us to (a) move all the stuff we own out of said bedroom, and (b) move most of the stuff to a couple of smaller (2) bedrooms on the second floor of our house. We also had to cancel a three week trip we had planned for May; you’ll have to wait until September to read about the rescheduled edition.

But anyway, it’s July, Sally’s sufficiently healed, and we fly tomorrow morning to Vancouver, BC to begin a two+ week journey through the Pacific Northwest. We’ll stay close to the coast, visit the San Juan Islands, Seattle, and end in Portland.

Packing for this trip seems relatively stress-free. Compared to our last major trip to Africa, we need a lot less preparation.

First off, pretty much anything we forget, break or lose we can buy along the way. If we can’t find it locally, Amazon awaits. Especially in Seattle, which is where Amazon lives 😉 . That was not true in Africa – what we brought was what we had. Even in Iceland, we assumed we couldn’t acquire much.

Second, we don’t expect the relatively extreme weather we had in African and our previous trip to Iceland. Cold weather clothing and heavy rain gear is just not required. I’m expecting moderate summer weather, maybe a shower here or there, and a few cool mornings. But since we won’t be running around in an open car at 6:00am, even if it’s cool overnight it won’t affect us much.

Finally (and this affects me alone), this trip doesn’t require the same photography planning as either Africa or even Iceland. I don’t need the heavy, specialized long lenses for animal photography, nor do I really need the same backup planning. I’ll take a few extra pieces just in case, but not much.

So the alarm is set for 4:30am, my bags are all-but packed, and we’re ready to go.

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(1) The effort was compounded. The fracture was not, although Sally – never one to do something halfway – broke both her tibia and fibula.

(2) “Smaller” is technically correct, as it describes the relationship between the size of the new rooms and the ridiculously large bedroom we normally occupy. Further, one of the rooms acts merely as my closet and dressing room. And neither is really “small” by any objective measure.