Tying up the loose ends

With the truck gone, Ellen and I are now getting the smaller items in our check list done (things that we can bring with us in the plane). Yesterday I bought some extra PL-259 coax connectors, just in case I need to redo some of my antenna cables (further dependent on parts of our equipment that couldn't make it to our home in time and had to be redirected to Arizona actually arriving there on time). Our two pelican cases we ordered arrived on Friday, and we were playing around with the foam lining. One will hold our handgun and magazines and the other our laptop and some cables.

The idea of using a pelican case for the gun made more sense when we thought we were going to have to check it in as a volume by itself. It turns out that with Southwestern Airlines the locked box containing a firearm can actually be inside a suitcase. So any lockable box would have been fine. This is the thing with trips like these: we're trying several things for the first time, and learning (sometimes the hard way) how to deal with the unexpected. The overlarge pelican case I'll be carrying in my suitcase is just a minor "case in point."

So, I'm also bringing a laptop. A two-year-old macbook, somewhat underpowered by today's standards, but capable of running the National Geographic TOPO! mapping software. The NatGeo (as the cool kids prefer to say it) software is a bit too simple, and often awkward to use. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of options for Macs and Linuxes out there today in terms of mapping software. It's a shame, since the USGS data is basically available for free (as far as I can tell) to anyone with enough brains to implement their data standard. I'm toying around with the idea of starting an open source project in this area (file under "when time allows"). But I digress. So the other thing we've been doing is buying last minute stuff online, like a Garmin etrex serial connector (with a USB adapter), and some map cds from NatGeo, covering AZ and CA (I can get the NV and UT maps piecemeal, since we're not covering much in those states). These should be arriving on Tuesday. I hope to be able to have some level of a rudimentary electronic nav system available, just in case Rick's state of the art GPS paraphernalia decides to die an untimely death. Come to think of it, it would have been a good idea to get paper maps too.