[4 weeks & 5 days until we depart for Syracuse the night before our flight out]

Well, I spent part of today cleaning up all the DVD-RW discs I had for the trip. I still had not copied over all the -RW discs that we wanted to keep as masters to DVD-R discs. It took about 3 hours to go through the 12 discs, decide what to keep and not to keep from what we had recorded starting with our trip to Hawaii in August 2007, and every other event, holiday and vacation since then….

Now, I have 12 reformatted DVD-RW discs and 12 new DVD-R discs for any video work we will be doing on our travels this May…. (8 cm discs). This will actually give us 24 hours of video recording capabilities on low res (60 min./disc), which is about 4 times as much video as I recorded on the last trip, so we certainly do not need to worry about running out of recording media….

Last time, I recorded everything on 4:3 ratio for our still old standard CRT televisions. But, this time around, I will be recording everything at 16:9 ratio for modern wide-screen TV’s in hopes that we will sometime soon be able to update to a new flat panel TV .

Well, after the TSA or luggage handlers lost the pull strap to at least
one piece of my old luggage on the return trip from Hawai’i in 2007, we
decided it was time for some new luggage.
This is nice modern luggage with locking telescopic handles and rolls
very easily. My old luggage was bought just before we got married in
1996, and has certainly seen its fair share of abuse the past 13 years.
Since Kohl’s had a great sale, plus an additional 20% discount, no time
like the present to get prepared to travel.
We are not down to 7 weeks and 2 days until we check into the Syracuse
Airport Best Western the evening before our 6:30am departure….
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Well, we are getting close to 8 weeks to our departure. Actually, it will be 8 weeks from this afternoon/evening when we leave home and head for the Syracuse Airport Best Western so we do not have to get up at an ungodly hour in the morning to get to the airport by 5am for our 6:30am departure on May 1st. It’s over an hour drive to the airport, so that means we would have to get up about 2am to leave home around 3:30am. At the hotel, we can get at least an extra 2 hours sleep, needing only an hour to prep and grab some breakfast at the breakfast bar, which opens at 4:30am for early travelers.

Continential DHC-8 Q200

Now to the topic of this post… I just did a little research on our planes for this flight… Oh, boy… The commuter planes we are flying in and out of Syracuse on are both operated by Continental and are the same or similar model as the plane that crashed on approach to Buffalo… The flight out of Syracuse is a DHC-8 Q200 as pictured here. The flight back to Syracuse is the same model as the one that crashed, a DHC-8 Q400, which is a larger capacity model than the one pictured. The return flight is also departing Newark, NJ, the same airport that the crash plane departed from… The only thing in our favor is that there should be no snow and ice in the middle of May. However, we did awake to 4 inches of snow the morning after our wedding (May 12, 1996)!

Just 8 weeks and 1+ days until we leave Syracuse for Hawai’i. Sure will
be happy to see the snow start melting, but it will all be gone long
before we depart (I hope!)
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