recording equipment

I just wanted to ask your thoughts about recording equipment for the Mississippi trip - do you already have equipment that you would be planning to take along? I'm asking because the admin people at work have reminded me that I have some money (around £500) left over from a teaching and learning grant that I received a couple of years ago and that I have to spend it before the end of June or it will be reabsorbed into general university funds. Because the grant was specifically related to teaching and learning, I have to spend the money on something I could reasonably use with students. (I don't think they'd let me put it towards a canoe, for example.) So I was thinking of buying an edirol digital recorder, which I could use to document the journey through Minnesota and which the students could use for their own research projects afterwards (assuming i don't drop it in the Mississippi).

I gather that edirol digital recorders store about 16 hours of audio in 16bit wav format or 96 hours in mp3 format. Now, I'm assuming that you'd be using something mcuh more sophisticated than that for interviews and ambient sound but I thought that, as well as the recordings you make for the work itself, it might be interesting to keep an audio diary, and mp3s would be fine for that purpose - in fact, they'd be ideal for posting on a blog as an interesting alternative to text.

I wanted to run this past you before doing anything, though. If there's equipment that you need to buy, I could put the £500 towards that instead (bearing in mind that it would belong to Sheffield University afterwards, so it would be good to use it for some discrete item). Let me know what you think.