My pack

I have a 65L Osprey Porter bag. We don't intend to do that much hiking, but we'll be moving from place to place often and the unloaded weight of the pack is just fantastic.

I traveled all around Europe with a 46L Porter in late 2014. All in all, it was a fantastic experience, but I also had my Tom Bihn messenger bag with me. While I like my Tom Bihn bag, I'd rather not have two. In order to collapse a bit more gear and all of my electronics into a single bag I regretably needed to bump from the 46L to the 65L. The bag, despite being significantly more spacious feel almost the same when empty.

• toiletries, first-aide, medicine in the next pocket
  • Aleve, Tyenol, anti-histamine
  • toothbrush, travel paste, hair brush, deoderant, razor, nail-clippers and scissors
  • 50' of 1.2mm spectra cord
  • concentrated hand-wash clothing soap
• Montane Minimus rain shell in the top compartment
• everything else is in the main compartment, two travel packing cubes and two Zpacks dry bags (a large and medium)
  • in the large dry bag: bad things that may happen
  • large travel cube and medium travel cubes:
    • 3 x Woolly boxers, 1 x Woolly briefs
    • 3 x performance wool running socks
    • 2 x performance wool cycling (crew) socks
    • 1 x long-sleeve Minus33 performance wool shirt and bottoms
    • 2 x Woolly v-neck short-sleeve shirts
    • 1 x light cotton t-shirt
    • 2 x linen button up long-sleeve shirts
    • 2 x Blackhawk Lightweight Tactical Shorts
    • 1 x Craghoppers Kiwi Pants
    • 1 x Versatac Ultra-light Pants
    • 1 x old jeans... sometimes a man needs a piece of home.
  • in the medium dry bag:
    • MacBook (12", 2lbs)
    • 8" Gridit organizer
    • Anker 40W 5-port USB charger
    • 5 one-foot micro USB cables
    • paperwhite kindle
  • main compartment:
    • The 8L Patagonia Atom Sling shoulder bag.
    • Sony RX100iii single body camera and an original Joby Gorillapod
    • The North Face Gordon Lyons Fleece Hoodie
    • Sea to Summit silk sleep sack (for when things aren't even "clean for India")
    • emergency mylar blanket
    • shoes (albeit one is on my feet at any given time):
    • Born Sandors
    • Merrell Trail Glove 3
    • flipflops, I love my Flojos.

That's it for a whole year. Wish me luck.

Planning: Insurance

It turns out that a lot can go wrong while traveling. It also turns out that a lot can go wrong while driving or living or working. While everyone needs insurance of one type or another, it turns out we need very little of what we did have and a lot of what we didn't.

We are very lucky to have USAA as an insurer, and while they have a wide array of insurance options, we thought a travel centric insurance plan would make more sense. We chose World Nomads for insurance during our around the world trip. Something we didn't think about before is that most of these policies will only include directly related family members (blood relatives). As our nanny is coming with us, we needed to get two plans: one for the five of us and one for her. To make thing sane we got both plans with all the same options so the only think we need to remember separately are the policy numbers.

While we're maintaining our health insurance at home, we need to drop all of our auto-insurance as we sell our cars and switch our home-owners policy to be one that is appropriate for renting to tenants.

Build a blog

I've spent some time writing some custom blogging software for our trip. It is important that our whole family be able to share their experiences with loved ones at home and do so in a way that allow us to recreate our journey over time. Once we return, we'd like to to be able to review our progress day-by-day and understand how things really were as we were writing down our experiences.

This blog leverages node.js and express. It's fairly simple and does not include publisher tools. I want to teach my family how to use source control and how to edit raw document sources, so I'll be having the bunch post their experiences by committing and pushing markdown to github; hopefully this doesn't backfire.

I imagine that the underlying software will be a work-in-progress until the day we stop publishing.