I am mostly packed up for my trip and am getting very excited. T minus 2 days now. I will say, it’s been an adventure just getting to this point. I am not normally an anxious traveler, but this time has been different.

There have been a couple things driving my anxiety.

The first was just making sure I was fit enough to do all the bike riding the trip required. Although, I wasn’t overly worried about it, I knew I needed to train. I did not want to suffer on the rides. I also had some irrational fear that I would end up on a tour that contained the entire Olympic team from Australia on holiday and I would be spit out the back of the peloton like a mouthful of spoiled milk.

So I had to think about what I would need to keep my bicycle running smoothly — wrenches, lube, sealant, tubes, patches, and an extra tire are all coming along for the ride. It also has a brand new rear derailleur which is good. I will just pray that my battery doesn’t crap out on the electronic shifting and that my chain doesn’t break; everything else should be fixable.

It also turns out that there is no Laotian embassy in New Zealand, so I have to get the visa when I get to Vietnam. I show up on Friday and the tour starts on Monday. The problem arises in that the Laotian embassy in Hanoi is not open on the weekends. I was faced with flying to Canberra Australia which was ridiculous or try and get the visa on that Monday before we get on the train to Sa Pa. There is no margin for error in that part of the plan. Fortunately, the tour operators apparently have faced this issue regularly and are going to help me and one other person on the tour get our visas. They are confident it won’t be a problem.

Probably the biggest source of stress has been deciding what I wanted this trip to be about. I had three objectives I was mulling over in my head: (a) do some amazing bike riding, (b) take some amazing photographs and (c) capture the experience in my travel blog. That is a lot.

Did I want to travel light and be unencumbered by the thought process? How important was each of these objectives? What did each require both in stuff to bring and in mental head space?

Although I knew I would have a lot of stuff, my goal was to not have a single thing that wasn’t required by the mission.

You get the drift. I finally put the flat pedals on my bike and did a short test ride. Negatory. Hate the things. Not gonna do that. Bike shoes are coming.

My next mission objective was photography. I really do want to do a lot of photography but the thought of riding around with 3 kgs of camera gear in my backpack was intolerable. The lead brick Canon was just not going to cut it, but would I be happy with just my iPhone? I angsted over this for weeks and weeks. My friend Donn had this cool Sony that was super lightweight and took good pics. I thought about that but discovered they don’t make them any more. The Sony A7 was awesome but brutally expensive. ARRRGGG! What to do?! I read about the OM5 and was impressed, plus it was about half the cost of an A7 — but did I really need to take it? Wouldn’t an iPhone work? Finally, Susanne gently guided me to Harvey Norman where I got myself a spiffy OM5. 440 grams of high quality photographic technology. Yeah! Sorted.

But what to do with the photos? How can I back them up? Normally, I would have a computer and take a look at them all and then move them up to the cloud. But did I really want to lug around a computer, especially my old MacBook Pro which weighs almost as much as my Canon camera?

I searched and read about various solutions which mostly involved your phone. I tested a few ideas, but even on the comfort of our fast internet, it was doubtful I would be able to make backups. For $190, I could buy a new hard drive that worked with my phone, but then the process was clumsy. I would have to download from the camera to the phone. Then from the phone to the hard drive. Then delete from the phone. I would probably need to get some more CF cards too, as I needed them as a copy. Ugh.

Finally, I decided to abandon the final aspect of my mission: the wannabekiwi travel blog. Further, I would just have to hope I didn’t lose the CF cards and lose all my photos. It was disappointing, but I decided the mission was drifting in too many directions.

This did not stop my angst.

I thought a lot about it and why I was so disappointed to not be able to do the blog on the fly.

I used to shoot everything on Kodachrome and Ektachrome slide film. At the time, it provided the best photographic results and it was easier to show and look at your photos. I had thousands of slides from all my travels throughout Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the US. What we didn’t know back then, is that the slide film degraded quickly. By the time scanning technology had come of age, most of my slides had faded so badly as to be barely recognizable. It was heartbreaking, but I decided that they were not salvageable. The ones that hurt the most were from my year long trip when I was 19. I now have only a few pictures from that trip and the travels throughout Asia during grad school are now but a vague memory.

Susanne’s family history in Spain is an incredible story of courage and tragedy. It is a very long story that I do not have time to go into, but it is amazing. In honor of this history, she has been trying to get her Spanish citizenship. Her grandfather was the attorney general for the Spanish Republic fighting against fascism and Franco. Their lives were in constant danger and at one point, their house got bombed. They ended up fleeing Spain and left behind so much of their history. There is a newspaper photo of the family after the bombing and that photo captures and validates so much of their story. One photo that ties years of history together.

The more you learn about human memory, the more you can start to see the value of photography and diaries in helping to preserve memories and build context to history. Looking back on my travel blogs, which I started in 2013, I can now see how important it is to capture your experiences as they happen. In just a matter of days the memories fade and change. This is not to say, just capturing the moments with your mind are not valuable, but the combination is pretty powerful. The blog and photos build memory and feeling triggers.

However, it does come with a substantial cost. Writing a blog takes you away from the moment and isolates you for a period of time. The paradox of trying to capture your feelings and experiences is that it can take you away from having experiences. This paradox was causing me angst too. Should I just forego the blog so I can be more present on my trip? Can I manage the photography and blogging without it becoming too much of a distraction? Will the blogging help me think about and observe the world I am traveling through with a more interesting and refreshed lens?

Back and forth and back and forth I went. The computer is too heavy. I don’t want to lose my photos. It is a distraction. It is important. It is not important. Truly, it was kind of ridiculous, but I did realize it was deeply important to me to find the right balance..

Finally, I gave up and decided to ditch the computer despite having spent hours looking for a good back-up solution for the photos. I expressed my disappointment to Susanne and how I finally ended up where I did. She said “you should take my Macbook Air. I need a new computer anyway.” This was a brilliant solution. It solved the weight problem, the blogging problem, and the backup problem in one swell foop! Plus, Susanne got a new computer.

So, despite my continued reticence about letting the mission drift too far and wide, I am excited to have a reasonable solution for all three phases — biking, photography and travel blogging.

I’ll keep you posted on how the mission goes. Maybe it’s too much…maybe not.