Well, it's barely two more weeks until we leave, and we are getting ready. I have been planning where to stay and what to do, as well as ordering a new memory card and extra batteries for my cameras. I will take both my Canon Powershot G9 and an older Powershot S50, but fortunately, they both use the same battery. I have several already, but they are at least 3 years old, and new ones hold a charge for a lot longer, so it's worth having a couple of new ones in reserve.

Our tentative itinerary has us spending the first couple of days in Quito, then a couple of days in Ambato, a couple of hours south of Quito. Then on south for another seven hours by bus to Cuenca, where we will stay for a week or so, with possibly a side trip to Guayaquil and who knows where else. We will then head south for another 3-4 hours to Loja, where we will stay for 2-3 days, and then fly back to Quito and then north to Otovalo for the last 4-5 days. All of this is subject to change, but becoming less so as we get closer. Based on what I have found on the Internet, it looks like our hotels will cost on average a little less than $50 per night.

Well, our plans are starting to come together. We have plane tickets to leave on March 3 and return on March 25. That means arriving in Quito on March 4 and getting back to LAX on the evening of March 24, but that's the way travel goes on trips of this distance. At least this is a lot shorter flight than to Thailand, and from home we will cross only a couple of time zones, so jet lag should be minimal.

As it happened, I was checking airfares again, to see if they had come down, and I stumbled across a fare that was substantially less than everything else I had seen. Typical low fares from Los Angeles to Quito were close to $500, but I found fares at $353 per person, so I bought them. Our flight stops in Bogota, Columbia, each way, but we do not change planes.

I was originally planning to spend several days down along the coast, but today I went to donate blood, and learned that if we travel down there, then I will have to wait for at least 12 months before I can donate again, simply because of the malaria risk. I suspect that the actual malaria risk is quite low, but the blood bank is ultra-cautious, which I guess is not unreasonable.

Anyhow, it now looks like we will plan to spend all three weeks up in the mountains, which is OK by me, and Susan seems relieved as well. Now to do more research to make our plans. And incidentally, we have dropped the idea of attending the IL conference. It would be interesting and educational, but it would cost more than all the rest of the trip put together, and I got a lot of the same information when I attended their conference in Long Beach last October.