This Is Travel Blogging

You may have seen the phrase “This Is Travel Blogging” used a number of times on this site.  In posts, on pictures or in tweets.  If you haven’t, there are a few examples here, here and here.  Take a look at the lead photo for this post.  It looks glamorous, doesn’t it?  Laptops all fired up in a hotel room. Beer. Smiles. Gadgets.  “Ahhhh….that’s the life for me”, you might be thinking.

And that’s how we portrayed it our second night on the road.  That photo was taken at Big Sky Resort in Montana.  The wifi connection the night before wasn’t the best in our cabin (I was the only one to get on because, evidently, I have a Super Antenna(TM) that sucks all the wifi out of other laptops around me, or so Pam says) and we were happy to all have time to catch up.  And we had beer.  Once again, it looks glamorous, doesn’t it?

Reality is the flip side to this coin.  In this case, the reality is we spent about two hours at that table, uploading photos, typing blog posts, pumping our adventure through Twitter.  I then spent another hour in my own room after Pam went to sleep and kicked me out.  Most nights were like this in one way or another.  Some mornings too when Pam would get up early and write her posts.

It is a lot of work to keep on top of things while traveling.  Kelly and I both don’t do well with reading/typing while in a car so that limited our time to write.  Photos needed to be vetted, geo-tagged, uploaded and then corrected on the map.  Batteries (laptops, cameras, GPS, Flip, TwitterFone(tm), etc…)need to be charged.  An internet connection wasn’t always available where we camped.  Oh yeah, and we needed to eat at some point.  Stop me when it sounds like I’m complaining.

All in all, it IS a fun life on the road.  I love the open road before me, driving and taking it all in.  And I DO love staying connected and communicating with friends, family, strangers.  But to do it well takes time out of the day.  Some days we’d blow it off and as a result I lost tracking data as my GPS receiver wasn’t charged.  No biggie, but annoying.  Blog posts were later than expected.  There is a noted absence of photos from some days.

Would it be easier to drive and not stay connected?  Sure.  We could have turned on the SPOT device and let it track our progress (it’s the one device that never needed a battery change).  Nights could have included more sleep.  We might have interacted with more locals rather than tweeting about our breakfast quality. 

But that would have missed part of the point for this trip.  For me, the idea was to make this trip as live as possible and help people feel they are along for the ride.  Use words and pictures to share our experience and maybe inspire others to get out on the road this summer.  To give the daily grind cubicle warriors out there a glimpse into another life beyond the 9-5 even if they are short on vacation time at the moment. 

The personal motto I have slapped on my business card reads: “EXPLORE - INSPIRE - EDUCATE”.  And that’s why I chose to take this adventure across the States with Pam and Kelly.  Travel blogging, and in the case of live travel blogging, is a chance for me to do all three.  I knew it’d be a lot of work.  In the end though, it turned out to be fun work.  And I can’t think of a better way to live life.