Day 12 - Camera down

Tegan was pretty stoked to go surfing today. Last night she was told she could take a surfboard out and it has been the only thing on her mind since. Before breakfast the kids got to play in the pool in the warm morning sun. We had our breakfast at the restaurant next door to PGi and it was super delicious. Correen had eggs benedict and the kids shared some french toast while I had french toast stuffed with Nutella.

We all made our way to the beach with the surfboard in hand. On the way to the beach is a narrow path through a wooded area full of crabs, geckos and we saw a pretty good sized iguana as well. The beach is an amazing stretch of real estate. It is white sand beaches for more than 5 kms, beautiful waves breaking just off the shore and when you looked around the most you would see would be around 40 people, surfing, swimming or walking the beach.

The water was very warm, Tegan and I made our way out past the crashing waves with the surfboard. In between the waves I had Tegan practice getting quickly up onto the board in a center balanced position. After ditching into the water a dozen times, she decided she needed her goggles and asked Mom to go get them. Correen left and I then took Elliot out for a turn on the board. I didn't ask him to get up on the board instead I thought he could enjoy riding some waves while laying on the board. With 3 wipeouts under his belt, Elliot was ready to move back to the beach, Mom and eventually leave to go back to the pool.

With goggles in hand, Tegan and I went back out into the water. She kept trying to get up and balanced, but she kept falling. She had better luck when she bent her knees and I thought she was almost going to get it. I had the camera ready and tried to get a picture of her standing but she couldn't get the feel for it. After one spill we were recovering and getting ready for Tegan to get up on the board and then a huge wave came and I tried to get Tegan onto the board and ride over the wave, but the wave just took us and sent us up and over and we, the surfboard and the camera went too. Immediately we searched around where we were, then I sent Tegan in with the surfboard to put it on the beach. Tegan and I searched for over an hour and we didn't find it.

I returned to the beach after our lunch to search some more and still no luck. For lunch, however, we were offered some fresh fish caught by Matt, Christina and her dad Harry. Elliot devoured a good amount of the mackerel and Tegan worked her way through a few tuna fillets.
The kids played in the pool most of the afternoon, played a little ping pong and then they tried playing darts for the first time. Elliot was a little more accomplished than Tegan at this sport, I felt bad for the darts the kids were ruining by them falling onto the cement floor.

For dinner we went down the road to a different restaurant and enjoyed a different experience complete with the gecko nightlife. I think Tegan counted about 15 geckos around the room. The geckos were clinging to the walls near the lights and continued to pick off flies as the landed near to them.

For me it was a real bummer of a day, I was upset Bout losing Tegan's camera and disappointing her as well. Sorry T.

Backing up photos while abroad

Being a family of four and attempting to travel light on our 7 week journey in Central America I have concluded that I will need to limit the amount of photography gear I travel with. I am considering dropping my 70-200mm lens and doing away with my flash as the first step to weight loss. My basic gear will consist of my Canon 7D, Tokina 11-16mm, Canon 24-70mm, Manfrotto carbon fiber tripod, intervalometer and filters etc. My backup camera will be the Canon S100 and Tegan's Panasonic DMC-TS4.

Being a family of four and attempting to travel light on our 7 week journey in Central America I have concluded that I will need to limit the amount of photography gear I travel with. I am considering dropping my 70-200mm lens and doing away with my flash as the first step to weight loss. My basic gear will consist of my Canon 7D, Tokina 11-16mm, Canon 24-70mm, Manfrotto carbon fiber tripod, intervalometer and filters etc. My backup camera will be the Canon S100 and Tegan's Panasonic DMC-TS4.

Since we are hauling our iPad and not a laptop around on this trip, I have thought of a feasible way to do backup while jumping from location to location in C.A. The solution that came to mind is to carry my high speed card reader and my 1 TB portable hard drive then use this combo to transfer images from one source to the other. All I need to do is have access to a computer at a hotel or Internet cafe with a couple of free USB ports. I have many CF cards for the SLR so I should have little problem keeping duplicate photos on those as well. I am only lacking extra cards for my point and shoot. So either I chance not having a backup or I pickup a couple of 32 gig cards prior to leaving or while there.

The second issue was how to get the photos onto the iPad so that I may edit and place photos into our blog postings. Our iPad is protected by the Otterbox Defender case and I highly recommend this. I thought of finding a solution to plug in the hard drive to the iPad, but that proved to be a deadend. I ended up ordering a card reader that plugs into the 30 pin docking port on the iPad and allows me to read the photos from my CF and SD cards alike. The only drawback of the Otterbox case is that it is fixed onto the iPad and the ports are deeply set into the case, requiring an extension to use the card reader. So off to eBay and I snagged one for under $5 shipped to my door from China. Hopefully the cable lasts the length of the trip!

Now I am feeling pretty confident about my ability to update my blog entirely from the iPad.