The Last Minute preparations...

...are always more of a rush than they should be, given the months of planning. This morning (Easter Monday) I set out to re-sync our Satphone/Tracker, which I thought would be a 10 minute job. 

Two hours later and I was still fighting with the menus, having discovered a load more fancy functions that have appeared since we last used it and felt I needed to play with. Notable amongst these is the ability to link the InReach base unit to an Android tablet via Bluetooth. This combines the tracking, map, topography and position information into one display that is now actually useful for navigation. 
 

OSM mapping - very detailed and easy to use.

The display has the topo information that I can't get to work in OSM - not enough memory on my old Galaxy 3, apparently - so this might be very useful. I also spent a long time trying to figure out how to delete the route we took in 2016 since it was cluttering the screen. I did eventually get rid of it but there must be a quicker way than the one I used. However, we now have a "clean screen" to drop our track onto and make it easier to decipher later.
The messaging and general admin are a lot easier as well since it can all be done on the tablet instead of trying to type anything more complex than "Is there anybody out there?" using the keyboard that pops up on the base unit's tiny screen. We can pre-form the routine messages, of course, which is a 2 or 3 button process to send, but it's always nice to be able to include a bit more detail.

 I've also wasted an hour of my life trying to upload some video to this blog...Once I'd got the camera to record in a reasonable level of quality, and for that I mean "pretty poor or it takes a week to upload", I waited 30 minutes for 30 seconds of moving picture to appear. Since Blogger video upload clearly moves with the speed of a comatose sloth and the internet upload speed in Morocco will be similar I think we'll forget about that particular media enhancement. This is a pity as quite a lot of writing could've been saved. Maybe there's another way, but a few minutes' research suggests that the Rest of the World suffers the same problem.

Talking of uploads, worth mentioning here that we've had a lot of success with the in-country internet provider, Maroc Telecom. The basic dongle-and-sim package lasts for 30 days and has enough data allowance for everything except regular video streaming, hence the comment above.

The orange-and-blue MT shops are in most large towns although a lot of small independent shops seem to sell them too, but without the advice available from the "expert" if you need help understanding how to set it up.

So, with Zero Hour approaching, what are the Objectives? What do we hope to do or see? We don't feel that a trip like this should be done without some reason. While some might argue that the journey is a reason in itself, we like to have a "motivator" - a reason to keep going when others might turn around and find an easier way. So:

1. Part of this year's motivation is the delivery of the medical and dental kits. Since a number of people have become involved in this we now have an obligation to make every effort to deliver them. From a purely personal perspective, though, we want to experience some things that can't be had anywhere but the North African desert. 

2. One such experience - or encounter - might be with one of these creatures:

This is a Sand Cat. They've recently been identified in the area we'll be passing through. Elusive, rarely seen, etc etc...it'd be quite a personal coup to catch sight of one of these.

I see a lot of time spent waiting and watching to come. They don't leave tracks or bits of their last meal to identify where they've been, so finding one will be down to luck and torchlight, I think.

3. We'll also be experimenting  - or re-acquainting ourselves - with the basic style of navigation that has gone out of fashion since the advent of GPS. Celestial nav isn't dead and a lot more fun and rewarding, as long as we don't get too lost, than just following the "green writing" - the GPS-derived directions. 
We've got an astro compass and a DIY quadrant (for measuring the Sun's altitude):

since we can't justify the cost of a sextant. I wanted to use a sun compass again but this really needs a vehicle like a Jeep with the top chopped off to make any sensible use of it. We decided this fell into the Too Difficult category. The kit we've got ought to be good enough to at least prove that Man can find his way around the planet without the use of batteries and satellites, although Sadler/SAS-type precision isn't very likely since the quadrant was made using an old school protractor, a biro tube, a map pin, a piece of scrap metal and a bit of string....if we get latitude accuracy better than 50 miles I'll be amazed although it would've been good enough for Columbus to hit America.This is how it works:

 The sun shines down the tube and when a circular shadow appears on my thumb it's directly lined up and we can read the altitude (angle) under the string. A bit of arithmetic and we have our latitude. Longitude will come off my watch and another bit of maths. All we need then is a decent map with a lat/long grid overlay, which is the most difficult bit of the problem to solve. Decent maps of Morocco's desert areas aren't easy to find. Sue wants to learn how to use it all, which promises to be a challenge! She might be a recently-qualified Master of Forensic Science (there were footprints across the garden pond when I got home recently...😆) but sums and spherical trig aren't her favourite subjects. Nor mine actually, so maybe time for a bit of revision. It'll be more fun, though, than trying to learn Calculus and Statistics, which was the activity on the ferry the last time we went. Sticking pins in our eyes would've been more fun, too. Good job it wasn't stormy.
4. And we want to get a selfie here:

By Andrew Szabo - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5336367

This sign is apparently next to the road south of Dakhla, but since the line moves a bit every year we'll probably draw our own Line in the Sand.
5. Throw a stone over the border into Mauretania. I hope we won't get arrested for the illegal export of real estate.

We leave tomorrow (Friday 6 April) so this will be the last entry, probably, until we get to Spain. I would've said "until we get onto the ferry" but experience suggests that the ship's wi-fi moves even slower than the previously mentioned sleepy tree ape....