July 23, 2009: Packing and Leaving

This is it.  The travling begins tonight.  It is going to be a very, very long week for me.  I did manage to sleep in a little today which will be really important over the next several days.  Can’t risk being tired from here on in.

There was a lot of work to do today.  Everything has to be ready for the week.  The big task of the day was setting up my new BlackBerry Tour mobile phone to replace my BlackBerry 8830 WorldPhone which I have been using since a week or so before Dominica and I went to the UK in late 2007.

The new phone is, thus far, quite awesome.  The most exciting new feature is that Verizon has finally decided to unlock the GPS features of the phone so that we Verizon users can now do all of that cool location-aware stuff that the iPhone users have been doing for a while now.  My goal is to have the phone set up so that it can track our progress as we travel from Frankfort, New York to League City, Texas over the weekend.  We will see if I can get that figured out in time for the trip.  I have very limited time to play with this new phone.  Luckily I at least have Twitter updates working.

Dominica spent the day packing.  There is a lot of prep to do and little chance to go back and get things later.  It is a very strategic trip as I need a lot of equipment to be away from home for so long but I also have to be able to travel very light because of the flights back to New York.  I will have just one carry-on, which is my CPAP bag, and my one suitcase with my laptop in it.  I hate having to fly like that but it is what I have to do.

Work ended up going a lot later tonight than we had hoped.  It was well after eight this evening when we were finally able to do the final car packing and shut down everything in the house.  It ended up being after nine when we were actually on the road from Peekskill to Frankfort.  And thus the drive begins.

We stopped at McDonald’s on the New York Thruway south of Albany to pick up our dinner.  Fillet-o-fish sandwiches as usual.  Liesl did really well sleeping the entire trip.  We was only awake for a few minutes the entire way.

It was almost one in the morning when we finally arrived in Frankfort.  I walked Oreo and Dominica got Liesl to bed and our “bedroom” set up so that we could get to sleep.  It was probably one thirty or possible two before we actually were able to get to bed.  The first three hours or driving are now complete.  Tomorrow we will be in Frankfort all day. The real driving begins early Saturday morning.

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