Oct 4 2006

3 Week Vacation! No MG, no laptop...

Posted by Joe Rinehart at 7:31 AM
9 comments - Categories: Off Topic

This blog will be silent for the next three weeks. My wife and I are headed to South Africa for a bit of a vacation. She lived there until she was sixteen, and I've wanted to see it for a while now. We'll be doing a six-day guided tour through various cultural areas and game reserves, then spending a little over a week with her grandparents with some camping thrown in.

This is the further I'll have ever been from home - any travel tips? I'm planning only sleeping an hour or so tonight and keeping myself up until 8-9PM SA time tomorrow (2-3PM EST) to absorb some of the jet lag during the 30-hour door-to-door trip.

Comments

Phillip Senn wrote on 10/04/06 8:24 AM

Good luck!

Chris Scott wrote on 10/04/06 9:10 AM

Have fun man! You're going to finish up Unity before you leave right??

Peter Bell wrote on 10/04/06 9:27 AM

Sweet! Have a great time there Joe!

If you happen to be e-ticketed, if you check in online just as soon as they let ou (continental is 24 hrs) you can often get the reserved seats. I fly coach to/from Edinburgh and NYC but I'm almost always in an exit row right at the front. SeatGuru.com tells you the best and worst seats for eah 'plane (apologies if this is really obvious stuff).

Good luck with the jet lag - should be easier coming back.

Best Wishes,
Peter

Jim Priest wrote on 10/04/06 9:52 AM

My advice - watch out for the lions... :)

Sounds like an incredible trip!

Jim

Scott Stroz wrote on 10/04/06 9:59 AM

Have a great trip!

Brian Klaas wrote on 10/04/06 10:43 AM

I just got back from southern Africa (including SA), and here's my advice:

1) Take melatonin on the plane to adjust yourself to the SA time zone/schedule. When it's bedtime (or a reasonable approximation of bedtime in SA), take a single melatonin pill. It really works wonders for adjusting to the +5 hour (from the US East Coast) time difference.

2) Get a camera with a 8x+ optical zoom lens for your game drives. Viewing game in Africa is an amazing, humbling, and indelible experience and you _must_ have a decent zoom lens on your camera. I learned that the hard way the first time I went and regretted not having made the investment. This time, I picked up a Canon S3 IS with a 12x optical zoom and the results were amazing. The photos you take really will be "lifetime" photos ('cause who knows when you'll get the chance to go back), so you want to make them as good as they can be.

Have an awesome time and enjoy being off the grid as much as you can.

Patrick McElhaney wrote on 10/04/06 10:45 AM

Hey, that's pretty cool. My wife is also a Springbok. She lived there until we got married. Her family is all still in Johannesburg.

Have a great trip!

Patrick