Second Test Transmission - Countdown

Well, we're off tomorrow. Up until this evening I would have said we were the best prepared ahead of time for any trip. Well, we really are quite ready, but I just had a minor crisis with getting our mobile phones set up for overseas use. I thought I was pretty smart - bought travel SIMs that give good call rates, are free for family to call us and  do not allow data downloading to inadvertently chew up the dollars. Which would all be good if they just WORKED properly on my phone! After two calls to the very friendly help desk, and several power down - power up and SIM change exercises during which they got it ALMOST working, I was advised to call Motorola (phone manufacturer). Oh dear, just what I didn't want to happen the day before we go. I had even given it a trial run earlier in the week and after a little jiggery pokery battery removal & replacement therapy it had seemed to work!

So I stopped and sulked a while over dinner, then went back, gathered my thoughts to give to Motorola, turned it on for 'one last try': and it worked! Only once, but that will do me for now! Too late for more messing about. I'll take my good old reliable (if expensive to use OS) Telstra SIM as a backstop, and both SIMs work in Penny's Sony phone, so we're OK. 

Anyway that apart, all is prepared. The garden fed, watered & mulched, food dealt with, pack-up-able house stuff packed up, grandchildren hugged, kids phoned; bags packed, checked, rechecked, more stuff added etc. Actually, we seem to be remarkably under our baggage weight limits this time. Penny thinks that can be taken care of with a bit of restorative shopping in America. We'll see.

Enough from here. This should test to see if my Blogging skills are on track. Hopefully the next one you get may actually have some travel tales in it.