Journey

[zyzyly]

I'm starting to fret a little about my upcoming journey. Here is what's bothering me:

1. I'm going to be gone a long time--longer than I've ever been away from home before. I think I've covered all the "take care of the house" stuff, but I'm starting to get a bit of anticipatory homesickness. It scares me a little to think that I will be so far from home, all alone.

2. Backing up my pictures and associated concerns. I'm taking an external hard drive with me so I can back up to that. Ok. But now I'm wondering about whether I should buy some sort of power inverter so I can do stuff like charge my camera batteries and computer, and plug in the external drive and stuff for the days I am camping out.

And I'm thinking of a larger drive, because the one I've got only has 20g of free space--that's only about 5000 shots. Yes, I could delete as I go along and only keep the ones that are any good, which would require way less than 20 gigs. But what do I do if my computer breaks down? What if someone steals the external drive? What if I drop the computer on my foot, breaking both computer and foot, and losing not only my pictures, but my ability to drive? What if a flock of strange canadian birds swoop down on me?

3. Overcoming my natural inclination towards introversion so I can meet new people. There are a lot of new people out there, and I want to meet them, but it's hard.

Interestingly enough, I'm not worried at all about the mechanics of the trip. I'm going to take the van--it's a lot better for camping. The mechanic looked it over the other day and said "bon voyage". I have all the stuff I need to be relatively self-sufficient for extended periods of time. I have a pretty comfortable sleeping mat that fits nicely in the back while still allowing enough room for all the stuff I am taking with me. I have maps and guidebooks, and know how to use them.

I have a rough idea of the first part of my trip, at least to Toronto, where I will be attending an eight-day retreat, but the way back is a blank page. I have some ideas, but nothing definite.

I've never done anything like this before.

Comments

[weaktwos.livejournal.com]

Do you have a cd burner on your laptop? you could stash a spindle of disks in your car and backup some of the pictures if you're concerned about a data catastrophe. At least, some of your favorite pictures if you don't want to back up the whole thing. Of course, did you say you had an ipod? you can use that as a hard drive storage unit, too.

[myasma.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about the ipod--I think all I need is the card reader thing, and I have about 20 gigs of free space on that too. And I suppose I could burn the essential pics to cd and mail them to myself. that way if there was a catastrophic failure of everything I had with me, there would at least be something waiting at home.

Unless there is a massive postal failure as well. ;)