On Friday, April 9, I put in my vacation request at work, which was immediately approved (my supervisor, Cecilia, gave it back to me within 10 or 15 minutes). Meanwhile, Jeff put in a call to Mancos State Park to get weather conditions, etc. They told him that the campground was open (and, actually, it is open year round), there was very little snow left in the area, it still got down to freezing overnight, and to watch out for bears and feral cats. So now we had a camping destination, and guaranteed time off to take the trip.

It had occurred to me that we could take the camcorder with us on this trip. On Thursday, April 8, I told Jeff my thoughts on it and we agreed to pay off the remaining three payments in one shot and bring it home right away. On Friday, April 9, we paid it off and brought it home. We immediately began playing around with it and learning how to use it. Running it off of AC, we found that we did indeed get very good quality videos from it. Then we tried powering it from the battery. No go. We tried charging the battery several times and it still would not power the camcorder.

Finally, we got on the internet, looking for replacement batteries. We found the cheapest one at Batteries.com. We decided to order it. I ordered it with 2-day shipping, which jacked up the shipping cost quite a bit. Jeff wasn't too happy about that, but as I pointed out to him, the battery probably wouldn't ship until Monday, and with 2-day shipping, should arrive on Wednesday, the day before our trip. It was the only way to try to get the battery here in time.