We have a public Google calendar up with the rough itinerary for our trip, and lodging plans. This is subject to change on the road of course, but it helps to visualize the trip.

I’ve been up past midnight every night these last few weeks planning, e-mailing, researching, and I’ve thought a lot about how a trip like this comes together. This is our second or third time booking an international adventure.  It seems like every time, at first the dates and itinerary look impossible, you’re overwhelmed by the options, the distance, the blizzard of information on the net.  You have no idea how you’ll fit together the puzzle pieces of the days, weeks, and destinations you want to see, and match it to budget, safety, and flexibility.  But then, gradually, with enough work and discussion and consideration, a plan emerges and starts to lock into place.

It’s still hard to figure out how much to book in advance, and how much to leave to the last minute.  On the one hand, we want some flexibility in the itinerary, and the ability to extend a stay we’re enjoying, or shorten a dud.  But on the other hand, it might be better to do the research and make the bookings up front. I will not have these research tools at hand once I’m on the road. The Lonely Planet guide, good as it is, just does not compare to the power of Google and the Trip Advisor forums.

So we’re erring in favor of a lot of pre-booking.  Fortunately in Kenya and Tanzania most places are willing to take an e-mail booking with no exchange of funds, so last-minute changes or cancellations are still possible (though unfortunately, a flip side of this is the oddity that most places charge a per-person, not a per-room rate).

Links to a lot of the places we’re staying are in the details of the entries on our Google calendar.

So that last post was from our Twitter stream - this is how I hope to do a lot of posting from Kenya and Tanzania - post to Twitter from a mobile phone and then have those posts appear here either individually or as a daily digest thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools Wordpress plugin. We will probably not have a computer with us (still a bit of a debate, actually, but the anti-computer forces are ahead by several lengths), so we’ll be reliant on net cafes and the kindness of strangers to blog and post photos, though hopefully Twitter will help  by allowing us to post “we’re still alive” by text message.

All you Twitter power users can actually set your mobile phones to receive our updates in real time, though they are likely to be posted in the middle of the night US time.

Casa Furtwangler is in departure mode… I leave June 2, and the ladies follow on June 6 - three weeks from today. So the house has piles of stuff laid out, and we’re having hot and heavy discussions about how many pairs of shorts a person needs for 8 weeks on the road. I’ve bought about six pairs of shoes in the last three weeks, gradually returning each pair after a few days of wearing them around the house. It’s coming down to the wire and I need some shoes I can wear and wear, but cheapskate that I am I just can’t bear to spend REI prices.

So I’ve got these two pairs home right now - left foot is $20 from Big Five and right foot is $75 from REI. They feel about the same, maybe if I keep the $20 shoes and add a pair of $35 insoles I liked at REI I’ll come out ahead of the game. Or maybe I’ll just have unhappy feet. We’ll see.

Meanwhile I’m posting a few safari pictures from my March 07 Tanzania trip just to make sure the Flickr feed works, and get this blog in the mood.