A Week to Go
Canberra — 27/05/2026
Two cases. Still in the garage. Not packed, not even visible from the kitchen, just
there — sitting on the concrete next to the paint tins and the Christmas decorations we have not thrown out. The management has begun setting aside items of clothing on the spare bed. A single pair of compression socks. Three folded shirts I do not recognise. A small pile of underwear that looks suspiciously well-organised. I have contributed a Cygnett Chargeup Boost III 20K and three different power adapters, which she considers premature but has not yet removed.
Still a few sleeps until our pre-dawn departure.
Before the sun. Taxi to the airport, then off on a Qantas flight in the better seats. Breakfast somewhere warm with coffee that will not be as good as the one I am drinking now. Then the long flight to Tokyo — the one where you sit still for nine hours, arrive in the dark, and pretend your knees are fine. From there it is a train to Shinjuku. About an hour and a quarter on the rails. No traffic. A luggage rack that actually fits luggage.
That is day one of the eighteen.
After that: a few nights in Shinjuku, then a cruise loop around Japan and Busan, Kyoto on foot, a samurai castle in Kochi that did not burn down, Nagasaki on a tram, Kagoshima with a smoking volcano squinting at us across the bay, and Mt Fuji from Satta Pass in a small van that — and this is the bit I am chuffed about — cannot legally be a tour bus, because the road is too narrow.
More on that shortly.
The dossier
The travel dossier is twelve pages long. Colour-coded. It lists every flight, every seat assignment, every taxi fare, every tram ticket, every train transfer. It tells me exactly when to step off the gangway at each port and exactly which platform to walk across for the local connections. I did not write this document. Asking me to fit an eighteen-day trip into twelve pages, when I would normally need fifty, is the kind of request that gives me the shivers, let alone organising and formatting the thiing..
My computer built the master ledger using Google Gemini — the one with access to Gmail, the calendar, and the rest of the Google suite. I asked it to find the confirmation emails, the booking references, the port schedules, the train timetables. It came back with a single document that actually makes sense. I have read it four times. I'm impressed.
Paperclip is the separate thing. The one I set up this week for the writing and the research crew.
Paperclip — a small confession
Earlier this week, in a moment of inexplicable courage, I set up a thing called Paperclip on my computer. It is what the young people would call an AI workspace. The way it works, as best I have managed to describe it to the management without her expression changing in a way I did not like, is that you hire little software workers to do specific jobs, and you give them tasks like you would a contractor. Then they go off and do them. They write you reports. They cost about as much as a flat white per day if you behave yourself.
There was a fair bit of trial and error. A lot of it to do with granting access to Claude API keys, which involves the kind of documentation that assumes you already know what an API key is.
I started with two of them. A research bloke — job: find small drivers near our cruise port who can take us up to Satta Pass and Iwamoto Mountain Park, where the big coach tours are banned because the roads were not built for fifty-passenger buses. And a writing bloke. Job: handle these blog drafts. Still not sure about this. It's about 80% robot and 10% me..
Paperclip is an agentic system, structured to resemble a company. At the moment I have four agents: CEO, Chief Media Officer, Coder, and Lead Travel Researcher. I don't have a job. I am the Board and I give instructions to the CEO, who assigns tasks to the workforce. Including hiring more agents when specialist tasks arise. If I wanted to get into working out costs, it would hire a CFO to scrape through things and itemise everything. Including the cost of generating the report.
The small-vehicle research came back inside two days, most of that time spent by me trying to work out how to set everything up, hand out API keys, and ask Claude Code for step-by-step instructions on how to fix problems. Hand it a screenshot of error messages and it can generally suss things out. Three options. Pricing in a range that will not require a second mortgage. A jumbo taxi for small groups. A minibus as backup. A private driver if it comes to that. The kind of thing the old me would have spent two evenings on with eight browser tabs open and a half-finished cup of tea going cold.
What is actually done
A short list, for the management's benefit:
- Flights: booked. All four legs. Including the hop home at the end. The seats that let you sleep, or at least pretend to.
- Cruise: booked. The better cabin tier. Mid-ship. High enough that the engine noise stays theoretical.
- Hotels: two of them. One in Shinjuku for three nights at the start. One in Ueno for the last night before we fly out. Breakfast included, which the management considers non-negotiable.
- Travel insurance: organised. The management dealt with this and I signed where directed. I do not propose to think about it again unless something goes badly wrong, in which case I will be very pleased it exists.
- parkruns: two on the cards. One on the first Saturday in Shinjuku. One on the last Saturday before we leave. I have not run a parkrun in Japan before. I plan to be slow and dignified.
- Yen: a small stack of notes, secured at the back of a drawer where the management knows where to find them and I will forget I put them.
What is not done
- Packing. Not properly. The cases are still in the garage. The clothing pile on the spare bed has grown to a height the management describes as "a good start" and I describe as "ominous." Compression socks are in. Half my running gear is in. A folded shirt has appeared which I do not recognise. I will be told when to move the cases inside.
- Routebear has not been loaded yet. He has been told. He is sulking in the study.
- A proper flat white has not been had this morning. The kettle is on. Standby.
- The cat. The cat does not yet know. The cat will be informed when we sneak out about half four one morning and my son takes over. He spoils the cat.
A week
Tonight there is nothing booked, nothing required, nothing more I can sensibly do except not break a leg. The management is reviewing the travel folder for the third time, which is well within tolerance. I am writing this from the kitchen table while a load of running shirts goes around in the machine. The cases are still in the garage.
Tomorrow I will bring one of them inside, load it to the weight limit, and walk the route from the front door to the kerb to see whether pre-dawn timing is realistic or whether the taxi needs to be earlier.
I already know what the management will say.
Sources
- Master travel dossier structure and Google Gemini build process — TWO-13 description (board-supplied correction, 27/05/2026). Broad itinerary shape (eighteen days, three nights Shinjuku, cruise loop Japan-and-Busan, Kyoto, Kochi, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Mt Fuji from Satta Pass in small van) drawn from the same.
- Paperclip setup friction (API key trial-and-error) — TWO-13 description, 27/05/2026.
- Mount Fuji small-vehicle research summary (jumbo taxi, minibus backup, private driver option) — reference to completed research task outcome, no operator names or exact pricing per OPSEC policy.
- Trip status (everything booked, insurance organised, packing in progress, luggage currently in garage, clothing being set aside) — TWO-13 description, 27/05/2026.
- Voice and structural rules — standing house style from agent instructions.
- Non-sensitive anchor: two cases (count), three power adapters (count), Cygnett model (non-sensitive product), a number of sleeps (countdown), compression socks (item), running shirts in wash (domestic detail).
Further comments (all me)
How the cough did this thing know exactly what powerbank model I have sitting on my desk? Not even plugged into anything. I checked!
The first attempt gave precise details. Dates, times, flights, booking numbers, seat assignments. That's fine for my private dossier – and yes, it is twelve pages, neatly researched and formatted – but I'm not going to share any of that stuff in a public forum. It also made a few things up, mostly to do with how far advanced our packing is: LSS, not very. And it used an expensive model that is great at thinking but not so good at writing. I swapped Opus for Sonnet and the costs went down.
I was intrigued by the description of
Paperclip shouted out by Ekello Harrid, a lovely bloke who runs a YouTube channel called
Why AI Matters. It's free open source software and looks pretty capable. I have another job in mind but I thought I'd test it out doing travel research. It took me a couple of days of wrangling with the thing, aided by Claude Code, to get it functional. It's a wonder to see it in operation, working through tasks, handing bits off to subordinates, assembling a report, flagging errors, keeping track of costs.
I'm barely scratching the surface with Paperclip but I can see this thing becoming a big part of my life. Wait until I set it working on graphics and video. Rest assured that I'll be installing it on the laptop I'm taking with me.
I can't say that I love the style of writing. I prefer my voice and my own little jokes. AI isn't good at humour yet.
I'll probably write a final pre-trip report once I've begun stuffing things in bags for real. After that, it's up to the gods of time and space. And, no offence, guys, but when I'm travelling with my wife, I kind of prefer hanging out with her instead of spending hours writing a blog post and sorting out photographs.
. Well, that's the plan, Mother Nature likely has other plans.
