Whaddya gonna do?

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Playa Bonanza, Isla Espiritu Santo, Mexico

Tim and I have had many debates these last few months about keeping in touch with friends and family. In the old days, you wrote a postcard if you wanted to brag about the white sandy beach you had been laying on. With the advent of GPS tracking instruments, on our Baja trip we were able to send updates on a daily basis to a list of 10 e-mail addresses. Each person on the list received a message like this:

Valdesca SPOT
Latitude:26.1191
Longitude:-111.2865
GPS location Date/Time:02/27/2010 18:29:58 MST

Click the link below to see where I am located.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=26.1191,-111.2865&ll=26.1191,-111.2865&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1
Message: All passengers aboard Valdesca are OK.

If you go to the link (OK, go there, I'll wait), you'll see the beach on Isla Coronados where we camped on the night of Feb 27. As you can see, it's a magnificent crescent of white sand on the flanks of a volcano. If you zoom way in, you can even see the texture of the bottom and a boat entering the big cove to the southeast. We sent these OK messages out every day. It was a sort of safety system in that we could also have chosen to push the '911' button which would have activated a search organized out of Houston, Texas. For the service, we paid something like $100 on top of the $100 cost of the SPOT tracker we carried with us. It's portable (a little bigger than a cell phone) and waterproof so in the event of a wreck we could have called for a rescue. The great thing about the SPOT was sending the OK messages. It was like sending out 10 postcards a day. Those 10 recipients could see exactly where we were, nearly in real time. They could find out the name of the place and look up more information if they wanted to. They could check the current weather in that location and the forecast to see what the winds were doing. They could figure out if the next day was going to be slack or frisky or if we'd be pinned down by a big blow. The SPOT messaging system turned out to be stupendously useful for the times when we had scheduled to meet Peter. He could watch our movements over the course of several days and see where we were in relation to the pre-arranged meeting place. He could tell if we were going to make it or not. And if not, where he would need to meet us in a rental car. We figured out that we could send a repeat OK message at an unusual time of day to make the point that "We are HERE!" and Pete figured out that it was our way of telling him where to find us.

Another way we stayed in touch was via this blog. In the flurry of getting ready for our Mexico trip, I figured we'd send e-mail messages now and again to a few select people. Then I realized it was going to be really easy to use Facebook to post updates. Some people, who shall remain nameless, were adamantly opposed to Facebook as they fear their privacy would be compromised by initiating a Facebook account (which is required in order to read our Facebook page since we only make it available to pre-approved friends). OK, OK, so I decided to start a blog. This, as it turns out, is easy as pie. The only hard part is that within eblogger there doesn't seem to be any easy means of sending out an e-blast every time you add a new post. The followers need to visit the site every so often to see if there are new posts. Since we sometimes had long lapses between posts (due to lack of internet access out in the middle of nowhere), I imagine this got tedious for some followers.

I tried to keep blog readers apprised of the SPOT Adventure site where they could track our progress. The only problem was that our OK messages with locations were not automatically logged onto the site; I found out at the end of our trip that I have to personally upload the SPOTS I want the world to see. And only the locations from the current month had been saved for me to upload. This is something that SPOT needs to fix in the future. The user should be able to make this automatic. If anybody out there has this figured out, let me know.

On our way home, I realized we were going to be overwhelmed by people wanting to know how the trip had turned out. One way to inform people is to have a slide show soon after you get home. That way, you can tell all the stories once to bunch of your friends. Even better, we thought, was uploading a slide show to Facebook. There, people could see a culled selection of photos of our trip, a lot more than we could offer via the blog. Of course, there was a great hue and cry (by people whose names I will not mention) about how they don't do Facebook. So I figured out a way to upload the slide show to the blog. What we hoped to avoid was having to spend hours on the telephone recounting our adventures, to the delight of our friends perhaps but turning the trip into a fossil for us. For the most part these techniques of staying in touch have worked, except for my sister Anne who just told me she no longer does email. She has an assistant digest all her email into bullet points. All the email from family goes into a folder titled "Family-to read later." Or maybe never, she said. All those beautiful Google Earth postcards I sent her from Mexico ended up in a dead letter box.