We hope to get a decent night's sleep. [Yea, right.] In less than 11 hours we leave town and head for the airport.
Our bags are packed and weighed to make sure they're not too heavy. It seems too good to be true that everything we'll need for this trip -- every item we thoughtfully collected and prepared -- is in those bags and they are not overweight. It's technically the day we fly because it's past midnight here. I had a fitful night's sleep last night and was terribly upset about a single item that I'd counted on to be with me during this coming trip. But it had disappeared. The tiny SD card that goes into my GPS device, containing all the maps of our North American segment, was not in its box. Without it I would be terribly compromised as I endeavored to traverse the highways and byways of the US and Canada. It would be like flying without instruments. Like sailing without a compass. I found it this morning hiding under the bed (I don't rightly know why or how it got there). We can do this trip after all! My navigation device WILL work. We WILL find our way across that vast continent. All's well.
Friday Razelle and I got haircuts. We now have rather short hair so we won't need to get another haircut for perhaps a couple of months. We look groomed and spiffy.
This morning we went to services at our synagogue one last time to have our Rabbi say the blessing for travelers. I announced to the congregation that we were going to be traveling for the next four months. I mentioned the Jewish communities we planned to visit along the way: the Jewish Community Center in Mumbai, the main synagogue in Singapore and the westernmost Conservative congregation in the United States, Congregation Sof Ma'arav in Honolulu. I also mentioned that every Shabbat we would try to connect with a Conservative congregation as we crossed the US and Canada. We will seek out Jewish communities in Australia, too. Fiji is the only country we will visit where we don't expect to find a Jewish community. I told our fellow congregants here in Beer Sheva that the next time I see them it will be to celebrate Simchat Torah. They shook our hands and wished us a safe journey ("go forth in peace and return in peace.") I'm glad we took the time to go to services this morning.
Our house watchers came by this evening and we went over the last details. We handed them their keys.
Noga was a wonderful house guest. At 7 months old she has such a wonderful personality. Maayan and Shalev have been so helpful this weekend. We will be in constant touch with them as we travel.
During the morning I will buy one last important item and by midday we will be under way.
As often as I can find a WiFi connection as we travel, I will send along new posts to this blog.
Keep checking.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
T minus 3
Everything we're taking is assembled in and around our bags on the living room couch. All we have to do is zip up the luggage and go. And yet we keep reviewing it all and adding little things that it suddenly occurs to us we meant to include and hadn't yet.
I've been going over all the confirmations of all the bookings of rooms, flights and vehicles we've arranged. I'm making a couple sets of hard copies of all of these. I'll have them as well as electronic records of the same so we'll be able to access this information several different ways as we make our way around the world. I'm about to scan our vital documents and records next. I'll also make my email correspondence with addresses and phone numbers accessible, and I'll cull through all my Facebook messages for more of these. I remarked today to Razelle how much time I've spent in front of my computer assembling all the parts of this trip and researching all the aspects I could of the various elements that comprise this fantasy in progress.
I still must pinch myself. Is this adventure really about to happen? I saw today that flights in Australia are back on schedule as the Chilean ash disperses. If they stay that way then this is good news. We are so close to our date of travel now that I can actually look at the coming week-at-a-glance forecast for Mumbai and know to expect lots and lots of rain -- sometimes heavy, sometimes moderate, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning. I also saw that freezing temperatures and light snowfall were forecast today for Canberra, Australia.
That's what lies ahead for us, if all goes well.
Maayan and Noga are here for the weekend and Shalev let me know he will also be here. We'll all be together in one place this last weekend before Razelle and I fly. That's such a nice touch!
I've been going over all the confirmations of all the bookings of rooms, flights and vehicles we've arranged. I'm making a couple sets of hard copies of all of these. I'll have them as well as electronic records of the same so we'll be able to access this information several different ways as we make our way around the world. I'm about to scan our vital documents and records next. I'll also make my email correspondence with addresses and phone numbers accessible, and I'll cull through all my Facebook messages for more of these. I remarked today to Razelle how much time I've spent in front of my computer assembling all the parts of this trip and researching all the aspects I could of the various elements that comprise this fantasy in progress.
I still must pinch myself. Is this adventure really about to happen? I saw today that flights in Australia are back on schedule as the Chilean ash disperses. If they stay that way then this is good news. We are so close to our date of travel now that I can actually look at the coming week-at-a-glance forecast for Mumbai and know to expect lots and lots of rain -- sometimes heavy, sometimes moderate, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning. I also saw that freezing temperatures and light snowfall were forecast today for Canberra, Australia.
That's what lies ahead for us, if all goes well.
Maayan and Noga are here for the weekend and Shalev let me know he will also be here. We'll all be together in one place this last weekend before Razelle and I fly. That's such a nice touch!
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
T minus 4
Drum role please . . .
The suspense is building. The to-do list has been reduced even further today to a handful of miscellaneous items. I signed my cellphone up for an international calling package with our local service provider and asked a lot of questions about aspects of the other related calling and surfing packages they offer. I can arrange for these myself over the Internet at the last minute and even after we've begun travelling. Very convenient. In the past we had to spend time at a customer service location, take a number and kill a chunk of time waiting our turn. It is so much easier, now.
I saw in the news that the Chilean volcanic ash cloud is now affecting Perth Airport. We are scheduled to land there in 11 days. I checked out the Qantas Airlines webpage to see what their policy is. They state their terms on their website for rerouting, rescheduling and refunding. I hope none of these three R's is necessary. We'll have to follow this closely.
We may be in for a bumpy ride.
A key contact person in Mumbai I've been trying to communicate with still hasn't gotten back to us. I will phone her tomorrow in hopes of arranging some meaningful sightseeing the only day we have available for it in Mumbai. Otherwise, we will just have to patch something together ourselves . . .
Once we clear the gate at Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday the rest of the world will be ahead of us. We hope it all works out according to plan. But if it doesn't, what comes next is not entirely ours to control. That's what will make this an adventure. In essence, the adventure has already begun.
Drum roll, please . . .
The suspense is building. The to-do list has been reduced even further today to a handful of miscellaneous items. I signed my cellphone up for an international calling package with our local service provider and asked a lot of questions about aspects of the other related calling and surfing packages they offer. I can arrange for these myself over the Internet at the last minute and even after we've begun travelling. Very convenient. In the past we had to spend time at a customer service location, take a number and kill a chunk of time waiting our turn. It is so much easier, now.
I saw in the news that the Chilean volcanic ash cloud is now affecting Perth Airport. We are scheduled to land there in 11 days. I checked out the Qantas Airlines webpage to see what their policy is. They state their terms on their website for rerouting, rescheduling and refunding. I hope none of these three R's is necessary. We'll have to follow this closely.
We may be in for a bumpy ride.
A key contact person in Mumbai I've been trying to communicate with still hasn't gotten back to us. I will phone her tomorrow in hopes of arranging some meaningful sightseeing the only day we have available for it in Mumbai. Otherwise, we will just have to patch something together ourselves . . .
Once we clear the gate at Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday the rest of the world will be ahead of us. We hope it all works out according to plan. But if it doesn't, what comes next is not entirely ours to control. That's what will make this an adventure. In essence, the adventure has already begun.
Drum roll, please . . .
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
T minus 5
The days are slipping past and the to-do list is getting shorter. My bags are essentially packed; now we are just re-sorting their contents and tweaking the lists of things in them this way and that. All the meds we are taking have to be split up into categories of now vs. later, carry-on vs. suitcase, etc. I looked up customs regulations for sending some of the meds ahead by parcel to the USA. The US Customs webpage gives the impression that we will have to be prudent about how we do that. We don't want to annoy any of the customs people. We are putting a lot of thought into this aspect, still.
A friend of Razelle's wrote to say that he couldn't access the blog. I thought I fixed that earlier, now I'm not so certain. I tried to troubleshoot this again this evening, but the problem doesn't seem to be solved. How upsetting! It seems that only people using Internet Explorer are having trouble opening my blog. If the problem affects you, then you obviously won't be reading this, and won't know to try some other browser.
Not a whole lot more to report in this entry. Many little loose ends are being tied up and tucked away. I spoke with some friends and relatives this morning in the greater LA area. They will be among the first people we will visit once we reach the mainland (after leaving Hawaii). It was exciting to speak with them in anticipation of meeting them in only a matter of weeks, now.
It won't be long before we fly. We are at T minus 5 days and counting down -- less than a week; hard to imagine.
A friend of Razelle's wrote to say that he couldn't access the blog. I thought I fixed that earlier, now I'm not so certain. I tried to troubleshoot this again this evening, but the problem doesn't seem to be solved. How upsetting! It seems that only people using Internet Explorer are having trouble opening my blog. If the problem affects you, then you obviously won't be reading this, and won't know to try some other browser.
Not a whole lot more to report in this entry. Many little loose ends are being tied up and tucked away. I spoke with some friends and relatives this morning in the greater LA area. They will be among the first people we will visit once we reach the mainland (after leaving Hawaii). It was exciting to speak with them in anticipation of meeting them in only a matter of weeks, now.
It won't be long before we fly. We are at T minus 5 days and counting down -- less than a week; hard to imagine.
Monday, June 13, 2011
T minus 6
Today I proudly presented all the documents I'd gathered to the government office that sent me out to get them. But, like Dorothy presenting the Wizard of Oz with the witch's broom, I was met with the response, "Not so fast!" They forgot to mention one more document that needs to be obtained. That document cannot be obtained without several steps and it won't be obtained "so fast" because we fly before all the steps can be completed. Crikey! (a useful expression -- in Australia, which is where we'll be when the document can be obtained -- which most likely it won't be until we're back home).
Today I converted some New Israeli Shekels into Australian Dollars and obtained a supply of US greenbacks. I couldn't get any Singapore Dollars. As for Fiji Dollars, don't even think about it. Except for the Rupees we already have and the Pounds we potentially might spend the one night we are in London, every country we visit on this trip calls its currency by the same name: Singapore, Australia, Fiji, USA and Canada -- all call their currency "the Dollar." As of this writing, the AUD is worth more than the CAD, which is worth more than the USD, which is worth more than the SGD, which is worth more than the FJD. (You'll be tested on this later).
I found myself feeling a little giddy today over a call I made to Australia. One of the fantasies I have held onto for this trip is to soar above the Australian outback with Razelle in a hot air balloon. I called Alice Springs and arranged with a concessionaire of the "Outback Ballooning" outfit for us to go up in a hot air balloon while we are there. His authentic Australian outback accent and his tendency to repeat, "Good on ya'" made me want to pinch myself. This fantasy is on the way to really being fulfilled . . . if the volcano in Chile doesn't interfere.
Today I converted some New Israeli Shekels into Australian Dollars and obtained a supply of US greenbacks. I couldn't get any Singapore Dollars. As for Fiji Dollars, don't even think about it. Except for the Rupees we already have and the Pounds we potentially might spend the one night we are in London, every country we visit on this trip calls its currency by the same name: Singapore, Australia, Fiji, USA and Canada -- all call their currency "the Dollar." As of this writing, the AUD is worth more than the CAD, which is worth more than the USD, which is worth more than the SGD, which is worth more than the FJD. (You'll be tested on this later).
I found myself feeling a little giddy today over a call I made to Australia. One of the fantasies I have held onto for this trip is to soar above the Australian outback with Razelle in a hot air balloon. I called Alice Springs and arranged with a concessionaire of the "Outback Ballooning" outfit for us to go up in a hot air balloon while we are there. His authentic Australian outback accent and his tendency to repeat, "Good on ya'" made me want to pinch myself. This fantasy is on the way to really being fulfilled . . . if the volcano in Chile doesn't interfere.
T minus 7
This is the log entry I meant to write yesterday but I fell asleep early and missed the time-stamp deadline for yesterday's date. I guess I wore myself out running around whittling down my to-do list. It was a productive day. I was determined to get the ticketing of the inter-island flights in Hawaii done one way or another. I called my travel agent to see if she had access to ticketing arrangements I didn't have. She got back to me a bit later to say that anything she could do would be far more costly than what I might do myself if someone in the States was willing to pay for the tickets and then have me reimburse them. With timezone differences to wait for, I couldn't call anyone in the States for several hours, so I turned my attention to hunting down all the documents needed for bureaucracy's sake. I now have them all, but it was an exhausting task and took a lot of forbearance (perhaps more than I possessed). At one of the offices the clerk chatted with me a bit about her recent trip to Hawaii. She said she had no problem booking inter-island tickets from here over the Internet. She encouraged me to try a different tact and sure enough, when I got home, it worked! I now have the flights, the car rentals and the lodging all arranged for the Hawaiian-experience segment of this trip. Both inter-island flights are non-refundable and the hotel in Honolulu is non-refundable. I can only hope that nothing delays us from getting there and getting around according to schedule. I just read that Qantas Airlines has stopped flying out of Melbourne because of a volcano in Chile. No way to know what scheduling surprises await us and how they will affect us. That's what makes a trip such as this an adventure. (We aren't flying via Melbourne -- Perth, Alice Springs and Sydney, yes, but not Melbourne.)
The to-do list is getting shorter, and more manageable, but it's still going to be a challenge to tick off everything on it by the time we leave. Packing is still one of the major challenges, continuing to tidy up for our house watchers is another and correspondence, which is WAY behind schedule, is yet another. Apologies to all who haven't received follow up mail. I'll probably write you all in a big burst of writing soon. It's all part of the to-do stuff I'm trying to do.
The to-do list is getting shorter, and more manageable, but it's still going to be a challenge to tick off everything on it by the time we leave. Packing is still one of the major challenges, continuing to tidy up for our house watchers is another and correspondence, which is WAY behind schedule, is yet another. Apologies to all who haven't received follow up mail. I'll probably write you all in a big burst of writing soon. It's all part of the to-do stuff I'm trying to do.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
T minus 8
The countdown is proceeding apace. Today, after a lot of investigation using the Internet to its fullest advantage, I discovered how involved it is going to be to get from Honolulu to Hilo and back. I figured it would be a simple inter-island commuter flight, but it is not simple at all. Were we to have US-based credit cards we could book the tickets on-line with Hawaiian Airlines and have tickets that can be altered if need be without extra cost. In our case, however, only non-refundable tickets can be booked, with an extra charge for doing so over the phone. Should our incoming flight from Fiji be delayed, the inter-island tickets would be lost (I imagine). We could book the tickets right there in the airport when we arrive in Honolulu, but I was told by a Hawaiian Airlines representative over the phone that in July, especially, same day seat availability is rare. I'll solve this, one way or another, as I have solved everything else, but it will involve extra costs I hadn't anticipated, and extra steps.
To fill in a few issues left hanging from previous posts, I can now say that the last of the meds has been obtained. And as for traveler's checks we won't have any trouble getting all we need at the post office. In fact, both the main post office and our local neighborhood branch can sell them to us. How convenient is that?
This coming week will be a full one. I've got to use my time constructively and stay focused on the tasks at hand and address them in the most efficient sequence possible. Lots of pressure. (Boy, do I need a vacation.)
And I must continue to pack intelligently. Once we take off I won't be able to go back and retrieve something that escaped my mind while packing. Razelle, naturally, has been packed for quite a while now. I've been distracted by other details. But, I'm an old hand at packing; I'll be OK (famous last words?).
To fill in a few issues left hanging from previous posts, I can now say that the last of the meds has been obtained. And as for traveler's checks we won't have any trouble getting all we need at the post office. In fact, both the main post office and our local neighborhood branch can sell them to us. How convenient is that?
This coming week will be a full one. I've got to use my time constructively and stay focused on the tasks at hand and address them in the most efficient sequence possible. Lots of pressure. (Boy, do I need a vacation.)
And I must continue to pack intelligently. Once we take off I won't be able to go back and retrieve something that escaped my mind while packing. Razelle, naturally, has been packed for quite a while now. I've been distracted by other details. But, I'm an old hand at packing; I'll be OK (famous last words?).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)