We leave the house tomorrow morning and we won’t be back until January 26th. (Note to would be robbers: The house has security and is well watched by neighbors and webcams) Jane and I have been waiting for a JTerm when I’m not teaching so we can do our Australian adventure during their summer, and this is the year!

So, all of our Christmas presents are things for the trip. We didn’t wrap them up and put them under the tree because we leave the 27th and we each got a new roll-aboard for the trip. We had to test-pack and re-pack to make sure we could make it. This is the new travelling ultra-light experiment and I have to say I am pretty excited about it. Once you do a bit of reading and planning it turns out to be pretty easy to travel for four weeks with nothing but a light roll-aboard and a daypack. Yes I’m a regular poster child for Osprey Packs

Its funny that the most difficult decision for me was to decide on the tech that I am bringing. I’ve gone back and forth between Macbook Pro (2016 13 inch edition) Plus iPad mini to 12.9 inch iPad pro plus Kindle Voyager. Amazingly there is only 300 grams difference in weight between the iPad Pro and the new Macbook Pro. However, I’m really excited about the experiment of writing daily blog posts with nothing but the iPad Pro.

I think I have the ideal setup (for a Geek like me) with Working Copy plus a dedicated server for my blog and Jenkins which will detect and automatically rebuild every time I commit a new post! I’ll be Syncing photos from my Sony 𝛂6000 to my iPad and then writing posts with iA Writer. when Working Copy pushes them to my github repository, Jenkins swings into action and runs Pelican to rebuild the static website that is my Blog. (I know because I’m practicing on this post)

We are very excited for this trip and feeling no guilt because Josh is off on a JTerm adventure to Italy and Kaia is, well, married and on her own :-) (sorry Kaia) I’ll be posting about our adventures here regularly, so stay tuned.