Our new smartphone arrived!

Well, our new smartphone showed up at just after 10:00am, right on schedule. Ordered on Monday morning, and arrived at the house on Friday morning. All the way from Hong Kong. Quite amazing, really.

But, that really didn't give me any time to get it set up and play with it. We were on our way to visit our son, and had to leave just after 11:00am. I unpacked the box and put it on the charger for a half an hour, but I figured I might as well leave it behind because it's probably going to take a few hours to get it properly set up!

Road trip!

When I ordered our new phone on Monday morning, it was scheduled to arrive at our door on Friday the 15th. Today. And, it looks like it will.

But while it takes two days to go from Hong Kong to Cincinnati to Montreal to Ottawa, it turns out that it also takes two days to go from the Ottawa distribution center to the house!

It's all about the adventure!

I've been spending a lot of time planning how we are going to get to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.

We arrive in Paris October 15th. And we need to get to Ashgabat by the morning of the 19th at the latest. Turkmenistan is one of the least visited countries on the planet, so there aren't many flight choices to get there. The most common is a Turkish Airlines flight that departs from Istanbul.

Final details on the sale of Max, our most recent motorhome

As regular readers know, we've always been very open about our monthly expenses. But when we buy a campervan or motorhome, it's difficult to include the true cost per night of that as part of the monthly expenses.

We've actually had people question our generally low overnight expenses as not being accurate because we do a lot of boondocking so our overnight expenses appear as artificially low. 

Into the province of Quebec

Our friend Kim is house sitting across the river near Wakefield, Quebec and she invited us over there for a hike and a meal. 

So we hopped in the car around noon, and it  took exactly an hour to do the 57 km (35 mile) drive. The route is fairly direct, but we have to drive right through the center of the city of Ottawa, so it's a bit slow going.

How odd is it?

In the off the beaten path travel world, there are five Central Asian countries that are collectively known as The Five Stans.

They are Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. 

Now that our visas have been approved for Turkmenistan, we've been doing some serious research on this part of the world.

Well that was a worthwhile end to the story!

If you haven't been following along, I'll give you the short version of the whole story, starting at the beginning. If you have, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs to the most recent part!

We had booked flights with Air France from Paris to Ottawa direct. When we went to check in, they told us the flight was overbooked, but they offered us €600 ($875 CA, $642 USD) each in cash to switch our flights to arrive in Montreal, with an Air Canada connection to Ottawa. 

Camera sold!

The other day, I mentioned I wanted to sell our big Nikon P900 camera and instead get a smartphone with a good quality camera so that we could reduce the amount of stuff we have when we travel.

So the other morning, I listed the Nikon for sale on the kijiji website. And it sold within six minutes!

Another adventure coming up!

About two months ago, we signed up for a trip to Turkmenistan. But I haven't talked about it very much because we had to apply for visa approval in advance, and Turkmenistan has a totalitarian regime that doesn't care about tourism, so many visa applications are rejected without any apparent reason.

We woke up this morning to an email... visas approved!

Decision made!

Well, I made a decision on the new smartphone, and I'm actually going to order it here in Canada rather than waiting until we get to Asia. It's the Honor Magic5 Pro 12GB/512GB.

Spent a ton of time yesterday perusing reviews and learning about all of the different characteristics of these high end smartphones. Two things are important to mention. First, when comparing the high end phones, they are all really good. And second, none of them (sorry iPhone fans) are perfect.

What a deal!

We were out and about for a few hours yesterday afternoon. It was pretty warm. The thermometer in the car said it was 35C (95F) which is definitely warm for this area at time of year. But, we had the windows down and didn't put the air conditioning on. I didn't think it felt that bad. Felt like a nice warm summer day to me. 

But then this is the first real warm day we've had in a long time! I wouldn't want to live in a place where it's like that every day, but I sure don't mind it for a couple of days.

I want to buy a very expensive smartphone!

Our current cell phone is over three years old. Almost an antique! 

Considering it was just an inexpensive Motorola phone, it's been great and it has totally served our purposes. We paid under $200 for it, and at the time I wrote "If I get three years out of it the way we did with my much more expensive Samsung, I'll be totally happy."

Future travel plans

We are headed to SE Asia this coming winter. 

Although we have made absolutely zero firm plans, and done very little research on what we want to see or do, we want to visit Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam over a period of about six months. And knowing us, that won't be nearly enough time. 

Our first grocery shop back in Canada

Jet lag has never really bothered us that much because we think it's important to adapt to the new time zone as quickly as possible. So when arriving in a new country we try and immediately put ourselves into the new time. That means forcing ourselves to stay awake until at least 10pm even if we're really tired..

Of course our sleep schedules are a little off though. The first night, I woke up at about 3am and ended up getting up at 4:30am. Last night was a little better and I woke up at 4:30am and got up at 5:30am. A couple more nights and we should be back on track. Ruth slept a little better, but still up very early.

August Expenses - an expensive month, with a big bonus at the end!

At the end of July, I had mentioned that we were expecting an expensive month in August, with a forecast budget of $4,500 CAD ($3,400 USD).

We ended up coming in only slightly higher than forecast, which is pretty good because there were a lot of variables in my original guess. But then, right at the end of the month we received a big bonus which dropped us well below budget!