The prize is a book of your choice at Clarke’s Bookshop just down Long Street from our hotel. Or maybe a Devils Peak ‘Kings Blockhouse’ IPA at the pub next door (I’m looking out for you, Scott). Photos from an earlier trip to Cape Town.

Here’s the issue. I’m going to be writing many posts about and during this trip and I should be able to refer to it in a more tantalizing way than The Big Trip.

Isn’t there a name that indicates we are traveling roughly halfway around the world and halfway down the world? Los Angeles is 30° N and Cape Town is 30° S latitude. Los Angeles is 118° W and Mumbai is 72° E longitude or a little over halfway around. The trip could be called “Over, Down, Up, More Over and Way Back,” but that just doesn’t have the right rhythm.

The idea of distance doesn’t have to be in the name but nothing else seems quite apropos for all of us. While Steven the Younger and I get to peruse the best of Gulf states shopping malls, our fellow travelers will be left with only fleeting memories of ski slopes in the Mall of the Emirates.

Mingling with the Great Whites in Cape Town won’t apply to all of us either. Me for example.

While the Backpack Safari will be shared by all, I think it wise not to name the whole trip after something we may not survive. Not the wild animals but the spiders, snakes, hard ground, all the peripheral stuff of budget life in the Delta.

Or maybe we’ll just call it the Big Family Trip of 2014.