Everyone seems to be giving you some good technical advice....but your intentions are probably more important;

You say that you're going backpacking without elaborating on what you mean. Backpacking a hiking tour in mountainous areas is vastly different to backpacking around Europe by train...are you likely to be carrying gear 2 miles or 20 miles a day? If the latter, then a bulky and heavy camera would need to be justified. Are you going to be in relatively safe areas where you'd be comfortable enough to use an obviously expensive bit of kit without worrying about someone mugging for it later, or are you likely to need something a bit more discrete?

And what are your intentions wrt to the pictures that you take? Are they purely for personal use for the family web album? Or are you intending to blow some of them up to A3 size to use in a presentation.
1.4 Megapixels will print up to 8x11 with quality acceptable enough for home use, 5x7 is great. But larger than 8x11, or for professional printing, then you really need more pixels (and a raw mode is useful for professional stuff too).
If it's for a web album, then consider that very few people have screen resolutions larger than 1280x1024, and most people probably use 1024x768 or 800x600. So 1.4MP would suffice for web use - and you'd still have to downsample the images so they could be displayed anyway. Although, having the 'display' images hyperlinked to the original image is useful if someone is going to want to print an image.
But my point is that if the main display media is going to be electronic, then 4MP isn't needed.