Safari So Good

Packing for a trip has challenges beyond clothes and toiletries to fit in a 33 pound weight limitation. We also need to pack entertainment, communications, and a way to keep mementos. On earlier trips, that meant a couple of books each, ipods, journals, and a laptop with enough DVDs to back up all our pictures. But that won’t fit within either the weight or size limits. Our solution is to go all electronic. We already have ipods, and Michael got a Kindle a couple Christmases ago from his wonderful wife. To round things out, we bought an Android tablet (ASUS Transformer TF300 if you care), a keyboard for the tablet, two 32GB memory cards to back up pictures, and two pair of noise canceling headphones. The plan is to download a few movies to the tablet to watch on the plane, put books that Michael wants to read on his Kindle, books that Karen wants to read on the tablet, and an audio Swahili course on the ipods. We’ll journal either on this blog or on a separate document with the word processing program on the tablet. The keyboard has a USB port and a card reader, so we can back up pictures every night from the cameras (using a card reader on the USB port) to the backup cards (using the card reader slot).
At any rate, that’s the plan. We know that things will go wrong, but we’ll adapt and learn. We’ll let you know what works, what doesn’t, and how we adjusted. The main challenge will be keeping all the electronics charged with only two power adapters that fit Tanzanian plugs. (The real main challenge will probably be something we haven’t even thought about. It usually is.)
For those who’ve made it this far: Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce invented the integrated circuit. This led to microprocessors, high-density memory, and digital cameras.