On each of my older trip blogs, I devoted one or more posts to describing the technology underpinnings of how I was taking pictures and publishing them on this blog. So here we go again.

Over the years, the camera gear got smaller and simpler (except for the Africa safari trip), and the tablet/phone/editing/publishing/backup technology got more complex.

Thanks to Apple and other general advances in technology, the latter has now gotten much simpler. On the last several trips I had to carry a bag full of gear to copy the photos from my camera, charge the cameras, charge the phones, tablets and earbuds, backup the images to a safe place other than the SD cafes, etc. On this trip, I only need two very small pieces of gear for backup:

– An SD card reader (the white gizmo) which plugs into the USB-C port on my brand-spanking new iPad. This loads the pictures I take from the SD card to the iPad. The SD card shown (the small gizmo) holds more than 3,000 images from my camera. I carry several with me; I came back from Africa with 10,000 images (not likely for this trip).

– A Samsung SSD storage device (the blue gizmo) the size of 8 stacked credit cards for backup. This connects to the same USB-C port with a cable I already need for charging the iPad. After loading the pictures into the iPad from the SD card, I can copy them from the iPad to the SSD. The SSD shown holds 50,000 images from my camera – way more than I’ll ever need for a trip.

Similarly, the battery charging situation for my cameras has improved. For trips where the photos were important to me, I had to carry not just multiple backup batteries, but multiple chargers – if the charger failed or I lost it, the camera becomes a paperweight. And I always carried two cameras, which always use different batteries – so four chargers. The chargers were bulky and required normal A/C power cords to plug them in. Today, all of my cameras (and pretty much every new model) can charge the battery inside the camera using an ordinary USB cable. And chargers are available which will also just use a USB cable as a power source. So I can get by with a single, tiny lightweight charger (the black gizmo) for the battery as a backup, which I will probably never use.

On the other hand, the USB cable situation is still too complicated. We need Apple Lightning, USB-C and micro-USB cables for our devices. And depending on what’s at the other end – a power supply, laptop, iPad or camera – these need a USB-A or USB-C connector at that end. So more cables than I would like. But cables are pretty small and light, and we only need two power supplies for all of our gear.

It’s been a long time, readers! The last Blog entries, and the last trip we took, were in November 2019, BC (1). That was our Southeast Asia trip, which was fantastic. After three+ years of no real travel, Sally and I finally decided to break out of our shells and start traveling again. After all, life is short.

Earlier this year, we planned a fairly major international trip for the fall. I’m not going to spoil the surprise by telling you where it is until we get closer. After all, life is uncertain (2). But we couldn’t wait until then, so we’re on a much simpler road trip this week in Maine (we’ll make another stop on the way home later this week).

So yesterday was a travel day; we left in the morning and arrived in the middle of the afternoon. After checking in, unpacking and resting for a bit, we decided to find a place for dinner (lunch was pretty skimpy on the road). The Arundale Wharf Restaurant in Kennebunkport came up in the TripAdvisor search, and turned out to be a great choice. We ate on the deck overlooking the Kennebunkport harbor in nice but cool weather. The food was good – Sally had what was probably the first of several lobster rolls.

We both slept soundly. When I woke up this morning, it was pouring, which AccuWeather promised was going to end in an hour. Unfortunately it continued to say it was ending in an hour until around 11. Despite this, we walked over to the restaurant here at Hidden Pond and had a fine breakfast. When it finally stopped, I took a walk and got some images of the place covered in raindrops. Pretty, but not what I had in mind.

Then off to Kennebunkport village to walk around and get some lunch (3). Sally had mentioned that it was too bad we lost the morning so we wouldn’t have a full day there, but downtown Kennebunkport is all of about six blocks, so we really didn’t need much time to check out all the souvenir, T-shirt and gift shops. The only thing we bought was fudge. We found a suitable lunch spot, the cleverly named Alisson’s Restaurant. Once again the meal was fine.

This evening we have reservations at the fancy restaurant here at Hidden Pond, cleverly named “Earth”. I guess the idea is that all the food we eat comes from, well, the earth. I’ll let you know how that goes tomorrow.

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(1) BC = Before Covid. But you knew that.

(2) “Life is short” and “Life is uncertain” both show up in places suggesting that one starts each meal with desert, but obviously has other applications. And what’s the difference between them, anyway?

(3) Sense a theme here? This vacation is for mostly doing nothing but killing time until the next meal.