New toys, plans, and all that jazz...
I have, again, been up to my eyeballs this last week with work, planning, organizing, phoning, emailing, and all that other ... stuff... that goes along with leaving a place for 6 months or more...
I had my first dental exam in far FAR too long done today, $200 down the drain, but it was worth it to know that I likely won't need any work done by Siberian dentists... not that I have anything AGAINST Siberian dentists, if there are any reading this, but I'd feel more comfortable having my own dentist work on me. As it turns out, my OLD dentist has retired since the last time I went to visit and his practice has been bought out by a new guy, Dr. Krieger. Seemed like a very nice chap all in all, though a couple of his dental assistants were a bit shy on the experience side (Having the person polishing your teeth talking to another person and commenting on how exciting it is to polish teeth because she "almost never gets to to do this" doesn't do a lot to instill confidence in me, but I survived, and everyone was quite nice and competent, so ...
My dad returned home on Friday from a few weeks in the UK doing family research and the like. We've jumped straight back into a routine of doing Hume & Hume's as fast as we can to get a nice buffer built up before I leave the country... There's a few fun / interesting characters coming up, so it'll be a nice change from politicians too (not that I mind politicians, but it's nice to get some variety :) )
As far as travel stuff goes, I've had a few minor-to-major developments as well. Notably, I now have a new backpack that actually fits me properly... it's an 85L Osprey Aether (The Osprey website is kinda broken, but you can at least see the thing) and I swear I don't even know I'm wearing it, even with 60 lbs or weight in the thing... I'm also well on the way to having some customized GPS software that's more suited to the type of application that I want. A friend of mine, Evan Willms, is coding it for me in exchange for my Lego Mindstorms NXT set, that I never had the chance to play with anyway. Basically the program is a fairly simple/small/light app. that spurts out GPS coordinates in a Google Maps URL so they can be easily incorporated as a link into my blog posts. Check out the bottom of this post for an example. It's pretty spiffy really. He's also got the thing rigged up to record trip-data while I'm offline, and output KML files that can be dumped into GoogleEarth later on if I want...
I've also finally made solid contact with Don Weber's fixer, Vladimir, in Ukraine. He seems like quite a nice guy, and has asked me to try and bring some Kraft Dinner cheese packets and Pepsi along with me when I go. Apparently neither of these things are readily available in Ukraine... It seems a BIT odd to me to be, in effect, including KD Cheese as part of a payment to get me Exclusion Zone access, but I think it's a good sign that this guy is on the same wavelength as me. I like him already :)
On a final note, I've finally set a good-bye party date... May 25th, at the Union Pacific (see map below...) ... Jimmy, the owner, has agreed to go so far as to post a world map and track my progress with pins while I'm gone... I think it's his way of keeping track of how long his primary source of revenue will be out-of-country, but it's kinda cool too...
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Nic's Current Location:
Union Pacific Coffee, Victoria, B.C.
+48° 25' 48.40", -123° 22' 6.59"
