What camera gear am I bringing?

Jeff here, for the non-photo types this post may be a bit techie.  No offense taken if you bailout now. 

So while I can select and pack my clothes in a few hours, selecting which camera gear to bring on a trip is a much longer process.  A few months before the trip, I’ll go on photo outings to see if I’ll be happy with what I plan to bring.  Now here’s the deal, you need to bring only “exactly” what you’ll need.  Too little and you’ll curse yourself on the trip for not taking what you needed, too much and you’ll curse yourself after the trip for hauling around all that extra weight.  In an effort to reduce the size and weight, I've tried smaller mirrorless systems, but frankly I've never warmed to them and have gone back to taking a DSLR (guess I’m just old-school).

The Kit

Here’s what I selected for this trip.  Given the location, I needed a camera body that didn’t look too professional, but at the same time, I also needed one that worked well in low light conditions as I’ll shooting during the evening hours in the cities and inside building.  With that in mind, I’ve selected the Nikon Df.  While the Df is a high-end camera, the retro looks (lots of dials) and two tone silver/black look make it appear older.  Now while the experienced camera thief will know the difference, the grab and run types are more likely to snatch a soccer moms entry level DSLR before mine.  The Df is excellent travel camera.  The images are fantastic, it’s great in low light and the file size is reasonable (which makes processing later much faster).

The Df

For lenses I’ll be taking the Nikon 16-35 f/4 VR and the Nikon 24-120 f/4 VR.  The latter will be the workhorse lens, while the former (wide angle) lens will come in handy for architecture and interior shots.  Both lenses are fairly fast (meaning they have a larger apertures which will let in more light in any given situation) and both have Vibration Reduction (or VR) which stabilizes the lens when handholding the camera (which I’ll be doing all the time as I’m not bringing a tripod) at slower shutter speeds.

Unfortunately I couldn't leave well enough alone, and at the last minute I added two other lenses that will stay behind most days.  First is a Nikon 50 f/1.8.  This is a very small, very fast lens that I’ll use mostly in the evenings.  Next is the Nikon 28-300 VR.  This is a “do-it-all” lens that will mostly be for backup, but I see using it while we cruise during the day, as it’s a much longer telephoto lens.

Now I know what I said above about mirrorless cameras, but I am taking a specialty one along – my Nikon 1 AW1.  The AW1 is a waterproof, crushproof camera.  If something happens to the Df, the AW1 is the understudy.  If there’s ever a day that a total washout, the AW1 will be there for me and if we visit one of the public bathes, the AW1 is all over that too. 

While for some this may seem like a lot, you can trust me when I tell you I took far, far more to Africa and the Galapagos J, and since photography is part of the travel fun for me, I tend to bring more that you really need for documenting your trip.  An iPhone can do that just fine.  I’ll report how things worked out after the trip.

Pre Trip Planning and Packing 9/19/2014

Our itinerary for this trip:
We worked with Jenny Mikkelson and Kayla Torgeson at Travel Beyond in Wayzata MN to plan this trip. How, you may ask does a couple from the Boston area (and we always have been) get hooked up with a travel agency in Minnesota? Welcome to the web my friends! It's a very good question with a very long answer! Click here to see how we found Travel Beyond.

When we decided we wanted to see this area of the world, a part of Europe that is just a little harder to get around on your own than Western Europe, we knew that river or ocean cruising is a good way to see places where tourist infra structure isn't as developed, since you've got your hotel floating with you.  The convenience of not packing and unpacking every day leaves more time for enjoying your destination. While cruising usually isn't a great way to explore a place in depth, it's a great way to "sample" places and firm up plans to return to favorite places.  

After sending us a pile of brochures for various river cruises (based on Travel Beyond's knowledge of our wants and needs) we selected AMA cruise lines because of their focus on meeting the needs of more active, independent travelers. With on board bicycles, active walker, biking and gentle walker touring groups, and on board gyms, they seemed geared to meet the needs of active travelers like ourselves. All of the river cruise companies offered similar itineraries, and prices are similar with small differences in ship's age, cabin styles, food quality levels or alcohol inclusions at meals. We are brand new to river cruising, so we won't be able to compare lines, but I hope to give a comprehensive review of how we are treated on our AMA cruise. So far, service has been top notch, and as you will see below, we've been impressed with the information we have received pre trip.

Here is the map of the itinerary we will sail.

AMAPrima Black Sea Voyage Itinerary

As you can see from the map, our trip will embark in Budapest, Hungary and travel down the lower Danube River through Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Once in Romania, we will fly to Istanbul Turkey for 4 nights.  Although the river cruise lines offer packages to include pre and post hotel stays, we decided to make our own way to Budapest and spend 3 nights there, on our own, and join AMA when the river ship embarks on Sept 23rd. 

Since we made our plans, my husband's sister and her husband (K&N) decided to join us in Budapest from their home in Great Britain. This is wonderful since we don't get to see as much of them since they moved to Europe! After our stay in Budapest, they will travel on West via train to Vienna and Prague (countries that are often included in the river cruise itineraries as pre or post stays, but we chose to save them for another trip) while we will embark the river ship and sail East! 

After we return I will include more details such as our planning process and packing lists, details about tours and guides...but for now we will try to live blog a few interesting details, thoughts or impressions along with some of Jeff's photographs. In the interest of enjoying the trip while we are on it, the daily blog may be less robust than the review after the trip, but I promise to include all the details and ephemera that I'm well known for including in other review sites! Also when we return, I'll be happy to answer questions or give advice based on our experiences, but due to limited internet access while on the trip, I may not get a chance to respond to each comment or question during the trip! (If I'm lucky enough to have any of you respond!) 

Pre Departure Documents we received from AMAWaterways

Pre Departure Documents

 Our docs from AMA came a couple of weeks ago, and I've had time to go through them completely this past weekend. 

I'm very impressed with the quality of info included in the docs; of course there is the usual vouchers, contracts, booklet  (Welcome Aboard) about what to expect on board (tips, services etc)  and luggage tags. There is also a day by day itinerary (Your Detailed Itinerary)  like we've received for other high end expedition trips. I like AMA's piece because it also lists in the same doc all of the excursions available at each stop and the descriptions are very thorough including the amount of time on a bus and the amount of time walking on each tour as well as an "difficulty rating". This is succinct and allowed us to make our choices right now, so we won't need to spend time on our vacation with our noses in a book; we will know what we want to book when we board! 

The other piece included that I was impressed with is the Lower Danube Destination Guide. This is specific to the section of the river we are sailing. In addition to Km by Km maps and descriptions of the sights along the shore and brief history of each area, there is also a graphic and double pull out map with Km by Km sights and which side of the ship they are on, as well as info about which area, and country where it's located and what type of sight it is (business, bridge, ruins, nature area, etc) Near the back there are destination guides for the major embarkation and disembarkation cities. In our case, Budapest and Istanbul.

It's tiny so it could be tucked easily into a pocket or camera bag, and it's jam packed with good info. I spent easily more than 100 dollars on guide books and some of them were good...but this little book is specific to our trip, and so compact, and helpful. 

The only guide book I could find that came close to describing the trip Km by Km including the "off river" major sights we planned to tour was "The Danube A River Guide" by Rod Heikell. It was written in 1991 well before the changes and Balkan war and still references Yugoslavia. Heikell travelled down the Danube from North to South (Black Sea) on a small sail boat, shortly after the Danube became more navigable after the damming. It's no longer in print, but I bought a used copy, and found it the most useful in terms of describing what we would see along the way, even though it's dated in describing the names of the countries. 
 

Other guide books and my opinions of them: 

Rick Steves Budapest 
Rick Steves Istanbul
Both of these are useful for organizing independent or private touring. I like Rick's approach about knowing your destination, accepting the culture one is visiting cheerfully and with an open mind!  I generally don't take Rick's guides with me, though his downloadable guide could easily be toted along on a phone or tablet. 

DK Istanbul 
DK Budapest
I like of both of these for planning touring and to use the maps in the destination. They are richly illustrated city guides with a "just the facts, m'am" approach. But looking through the photos really helps us identify what sights and experiences we'd like to see and have. One reason I do like to bring DK guides- especially in areas where I don't speak or can't easily translate the signs, is because they have wonderful illustrations of the major sights, with inset photos or drawings and descriptions of each. These can serve as museum guides in places where you can't find an English guide, and the maps are sometimes easier to read in English than in the local language! 

We also looked through general travel guides for all the countries we plan to visit; Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, as well as some regional guides (Central Europe, Eastern Europe, etc) What we found was the areas we planned to visit on a river cruise were only mentioned in at most with a paragraph or two.  And we would have had to purchase several books to cover the area we were touring. This did not seem worth it to us. 

But the AMA provided Destination Guide is a wonderful (and easily packable) resource specific to our trip, and I'm delighted to have it! (The guide we got would also cover a cruise from Vienna to Budapest, as well as our Black Sea Budapest to Bucharest cruise) One warning: it's so tiny that I bought a magnifying bookmark to carry with it!

My one nitpick- I think it should be sent out at least 2-3 months (or in my case 6 or more months!!) before sailing rather than 4 weeks (minus shipping time to my TA, minus a day shipping time from my TA to me) In other words, it's one of the best resources about the region specific to the itinerary, and I would like to have had it much earlier to make my plans for pre and post tours as well as any private tours I might choose to do on our own. In our case, a guide we tried to hire in Budapest was booked 9 months in advance, so having a plan in place for touring several months before sailing is not unusual and my best resource for deciding what I might like to see and do where didn't arrive in my home until about a month before the trip. I understand that specific itinerary information or tickets cannot be issued much earlier, but I would like to see this general Destination Guide provided after booking rather than with the final documents. 

Packing

So before we can go anywhere, we need to pack! Jeff and I very different packing styles. I pack weeks (ok, months!) in advance; I stage clothing I'll need for the trip somewhere and shop if I need additional items. Usually about 2-4 weeks before the trip, I will have more or less everything I need set aside in the bag and ready to go! Jeff tends to pack a few days before we leave. His rule is pack with just enough time to order anything missing from Amazon with free 2 day shipping before he leaves. Two different styles; but we both usually have what we need packed in a very organized way!

Usually, we are both pretty light packers, having discovered during an Alaska trip the pitfalls of over packing (that's another long tale, which I can share one day when we aren't traveling and I haven't got anything more interesting to write about!) Oftentimes, we will simply use a carry on roller bag and I carry my favorite backpack (another topic for a slow day!) for a trip to a warm destination or one where we can reasonably expect to do laundry.

My favorite travel back pack...it was a freebie from Jeff's former employer, but its loaded with pockets!

Jeff carries a brief case style Tenba camera bag which holds almost all of his equipment and whatever he needs on board the plane to be comfortable.  He has occasionally taken 2-3 business trips with simply the brief case bag and nothing else.

The Tenba bag that has worked for a 3 day business trip!!

For this trip, we decided to each pack a checked bag. We are flying Istanbul Air and are allowed one checked bag each. Give the interesting markets on our itinerary in Istanbul and Budapest, we felt we did not want to be packed so tightly that we could not bring home some treasures if we find any!  Sometimes we will check just one bag for two of us, but the splurge is taking two checked bags. Since both bags roll, we are hoping we can still easily manage to walk to the ship in Budapest from our hotel. 

Kathy's carry on bag

Kathy's suitcase...with the Eagle Creek cubes

We recently discovered the Eagle Creek packing system.  I resisted this for years thinking I could pack much more cheaply in large plastic zip bags. I bought some cubes for our daughter to take on a two week trip to Europe and since we've started using them, we are sold on them! The plastic bags helped organize things, but they were slippery and things tended to get rounded in the middle, making them hard to stack.  The cubes work beautifully because you can layer, and with the clothing rolled, you can fit quite a bit in even the littlest cubes! Using the packing cubes is one of those tips I've read for years on Cruise Critic and just dismissed as a waste of money...until I tried it! 

...with an extra pocket left empty in case we find any treasures in the markets!

So we are packed and ready to go! Jeff will post a little about his camera "kit" for this trip, for people interested in photography and then our next post will be from the road. We have complimentary internet at all our hotels and on the AMAPrima, so I'm hopeful we can continue adding to the blog as we travel!

Independence: no one we mention in this blog has paid or provided product or services to us to mention them (in the case of the camera gear- I wish!!) ...at this point we are completely independent, with no sponsors asking us to promote products...we buy all our own travel and stuff and our opinions are based on our own experiences.

Why do we travel?

Because of CHANGE. Change and the reality of it have driven our travel plans for a while now...there are three kinds of change that affect our plans and our travel choices.

Social and Political change: 
In 1989 I had just finished college, and was just starting my career. We had already done a bit of international travel, to Nova Scotia, Canada,  Great Britain and France Bonaire for snorkeling and it didn't take long to realize that we live in a big world and if we wanted to see a lot of it, we were going to have to be organized about how we approached it. I had a fixed idea about the places in the world, that somehow they would always be there, on the map just as they always were, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia,  just waiting around in the same shape and color on my globe till I got around to going there. 

And some places were deemed places I could never go- such as the communist countries of Hungary and Romania. Most of my education was pretty practical, so I never got into a lot of history about the different peoples that populated different regions of the world and how wars and terrible circumstances affected their lives and the very borders of the places they lived. Most history classes got to WWII and then it was summer vacation. 

Then a very public thing happened on November 9 th 1989, the people of East Berlin who had already been pouring through Austria and Hungary and looping back to West Germany took matters in their own hands and removed the wall separating the divided city of Berlin. I'm not a historian, but I was a grown up and reading the papers. For me this was the first inkling that the map could change, that what was once off limits to travel could be open, and what once was open could be closed. Later in the mid 90s, the wars and circumstances that led to the break up of the USSR and the Balkans opened my eyes to the idea that places can change, and they can change in a hurry. 

Australian Mourning Display after the Jakarta Bombings

Environmental change:
Most of our travel in the early 21st century was nature and wildlife travel with our children, who are endlessly fascinated by flora and fauna. We traveled to Alaska, Costa Rica, Botswana and Zambia. During these trips we heard about and saw change again, and in these cases the perils of environmental change...glaciers shrinking, habitat shrinking, animals and plants disappearing forever. Again, we began to think about the fleeting nature of our planet and how changes could affect our experiences in a place. Suddenly going to places that might be irrevocably changed forever took on greater urgency. 

Melting Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau Alaska

Changes in our own lives:
Once we traveled to Australia for a week. 36 hours each way of flying and wandering airports to spend a week in Australia. It was a fantastic opportunity (a comped flight and hotel room for a conference) but we could not take more than a week because of work and young children at home. But we seized the opportunity. While we were there, most Australians marveled that they never see Americans between 30 and 50 in their country. Yes, they see some backpackers, and yes, they see individuals or tours of retired folks, but they were shocked to see us at mid thirties, there in their country, for only a week! But it was absolutely worth it to go! 

Part of our travel philosophy is to prioritize the difficult, arduous, adventurous travel while we are young and healthy enough to manage it more easily. Cramming into a coach seat for 16 hours is easier at 40 than 70. Hiking a volcano in Quito is more challenging at 80 than 50. But as we explained to the Ozzie's, the reason you don't see many people that age making these kinds of trips is the calendar; 2 weeks vacation, maybe 3 after 5 years. With so little time off, people in the United States can't be blamed for wanting to fly or drive 3 hours to the nearest tiki hut and sit under it with an umbrella drink until Monday. 

Climbing the Teleferiqo in Quito Ecuador

We decided not to go that route.  For all of the reasons above, we decided to plot a course that fit our budgets,  both financial and vacation days, to make a life list of places we wanted to see before they and we changed and it became impossible. Since we've made our list, "change" has created new travel "possibilities" such as Cuba, which is now open to People To People cultural tours and eliminated others, such as the Bioluminescent Bay in Farjardo, Puerto Rico, which because of nearby development barely contains the organism that causes the dramatic fluorescence any longer. 

So this trip got on our list as we recognized that this was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of the countries we are visiting were impossible to visit even 20 years ago, with wars going on. Today they are poised to join the European Union and are beginning to build tourist infrastructure that will change them forever- hopefully in good ways that will bring political and economic stability to the region for a long time. But as we joke about this trip- we want to see them before there is a MacDonalds on every corner. We look forward to sharing our adventure with you and what we learn as we meet the folks in a part of the world we could not have met even 2 decades ago!