The Power of Asking Questions When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
As I contemplate our next Boots and Coffee post about gear, I have stalled because I am not sure how to describe the unbelievable amount of research that seems necessary to decide on the proper gear for our journey. Choice of gear involves many decisions and a lot of exhausting thinking: it’s not just what gear do I need because decision-making involves consideration of how MUCH gear can be taken and how costly will that gear be if we opt for it. So, what to do first? Make a “wish list’ of desirable gear and then research the best choices within these items, followed by an accounting of the cost? Or do we decide on “essential” gear, figure what that will cost (if we need to add purchases to our supply), and then figure out if we have the space? It often feels like it is a sort of a chicken-and-egg thing – and I’m sometimes immobilized by how to approach these questions.
There are many bloggers on the road who have considered these questions and I would be remiss if I didn’t, once again, acknowledge the hefty assistance of resources such as Life Remotely, which blog contains a gear section with 3 subsections: choosing gear, packing advice and packing lists. Similar lists exist on many other blogs and Overland websites. They are wonderful starting points but one soon realizes, as one reads through these sites, that there is clearly no “one size fits all.” First, space is a real limitation for us since we are not traveling in a RV with oodles of storage. Obviously, finances are another real limitation. And you can fill in the blanks about the other criteria that you might consider if you were in our boots.
One of the more formidable tasks for us is in knowing the right questions to ask about gear. Here’s an example: Roque and I have traveled outside the country on a number of occasions and struggled with the issue of cell phone and data connectivity. There are scores of words written on this subject and, sadly, every country seems to present it’s own challenges. When in Canada this summer, having done a hefty amount of research before we crossed the border, we spent a couple of hours on our first full day in Nova Scotia, hunting down prepaid sim cards to insert in our (then) unlocked iPhones. (I won’t bore you with the details of why this took hours rather than minutes). Sim card in hand and iPhones with data in our lap, we navigated beautifully to the spots where we wanted to go. It all worked swimmingly until 2 days later when we found ourselves in the middle of Prince Edward Island with no data connection and no cell service to help us navigate through the problem solving. We sought out a place with WiFi and made a series of calls only to find out that 1) we had already blown through $100 worth of data and 2) we could have added a Canadian plan to our Sprint plan at a very inexpensive rate that would have been tons easier than our sim card purchase and time spent in cell phone stores and in trouble shooting through the data dilemma.
Clearly, my research was not thorough enough. Continue reading “What the heck is a SPOT?”
Boots and Coffee 