We're all going on a....

... spring holiday! I'm shortly off on holiday to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Hoping that it lives up to expectations, since it feels like I've been planning this trip for years. Flying in to Quito, the capital, then up to the cloudforest for a couple of days, back down through Quito for a flight to the amazon rainforest, 5 days in an indigenously owned lodge in the rainforest, back to Quito for a couple of days, and then 8 days sailing round Galapagos. Preparations have mostly consisted of running round Millets throwing random items into a basket and frantically searching for my mysteriously vanished spare camera battery - possibly would've been more useful to learn some spanish/become an expert on amazonian wildlife but I've been a bit distracted by my need to systematically review 40,000 potentially relevant abstracts before I went. Tried to read Darwin's Beagle diary but it was the unedited version and rambled on for pages and pages about his preparations for the voyage, Southampton, the size of his cabin, what he ate for breakfast etc. He should've published a blog...