We'll be moving to our new home, www.familyroadtrippers.com, soon. In the short term we'll probably just point the blogspot content to our site. In the intermediate term, we'll add extra content to the site, in the long term, we'll re-configure the blog, content, maps, and links. I don't expect to have everything figured out this week as I'm waiting in the airport right now for my flight to Orlando and the International Builder's Show.
More updates when I get back this weekend!
Getting Ready to Move to Our New Domain
I Love My GPS!
I never thought I'd say it, but paper maps aren't the best way to travel.
There, I said it.
I'm a map guy. The bigger the better. In college, I used to tack US Forest Service maps on the wall in my office. They extended up onto the ceiling and down to the floor. After college, I worked as a biologist on a fishing trawler in the Bering Sea in Alaska. We had a Global Positioning System device on board, which basically tracked our position all over the open sea. It was a strange new device that cost a ton, but was worth it for fishing boasts in one of the most dangerous places on earth.
The GPS device we had on the Northwest Enterprise didn't have a little map; it simply told us our longitude and latitude which we used to plot our location on the charts. Fast forward twenty years, GPS devices are available in cell phones. My how times have changed.
But I'm a map guy. As useful as a GPS was on a fishing boat a hundred miles from land, I simply couldn't see the value in a teeny screen with a teeny map on it. Until Tinsley bought one for me for Christmas. For fun, I punched in a few addresses and had the device lead me around town, which seemed pretty useful. But the other night I had to attend a dinner party for work. It was a dark and foggy night and the house was on a skinny country road in west Connecticut. There was no way I could possibly read the street signs , mailbox numbers, or even see the lines on the road for that matter. But my new Magellan Maestro 3100 brought me there and home without a hitch.
I'll still use a road atlas for the big picture, but when I get to the city, or town, and need to find a particular address, I'll flip on my GPS and set my mind at ease. It even has little icons that point out gas stations, banks, and grocery stores.
I'm sold. Buy one.
Poll results
While I'm happy to see that more visitors are voting in the polls (although only 18 out of over 5,000), I'm a little concerned that three of them have chosen "hate you." I suppose it's my own fault for offering it as an option, but I sort of thought it was a funny little joke.
I didn't think you'd really click it.
Live and learn...
Make Learning Fun and Memorable
Here's a post from Fodor's forum in a discussion about whether or not to take kids out of school so the family could travel. It's from a year ago and when I read it, I was very impressed with the author's system. I just stumbled accross it again the other day, so here it is:
Author: escargotDate: 01/24/2007, 05:20 pm
We are the parents who always pulled our kids out of school if need be - esp at earlier ages - and when they were your kids ages, here is what I would do: Most of my kids teachers gave them some sort of an assignment and/or some work sheets to do with no problem and were thrilled they were going to visit somewhere new and have some different educational experiences. Just my experience, I know not everyone's.
Each child had a notebook that was their trip journal. If they couldn't write - or write much - they wrote a sentence or two or did it with photos, cut outs from travel guides, ticket stubs, pictures they drew and they would often leave spaces for a photo they would have developed later - I used to give them each a disposable camera so they could also take photos of favorite things.
When they were younger, I took the time to make them a "Find Me" book as I called it. I would make a separate notebook with things we would see along our travel, depending on where we were headed, this booklet might include monuments, museums, a famous painting, a Paris street lamp or bridge, a famous street sign or boulevard, double decker bus, whatever. Even key phrases in another language - like a simple hello, welcome, goodbye, etc - so they had to look and listen for things.
The kids would carry the Find Me book along with them and keep an eye out for these things and check them off when they found them. It became sort of a fun competition but kept their eyes and ears open and aware of their surroundings. No matter their age, each child would get to choose one thing we would absolutely do in each location (younger ones needing my help to choose). This is how we ended up taking a tour of the sewers and the entire underground 'world' under Paris ! Yup, an 8 yr old boy picked that one; my daughter was more apt to choose a store, cafe that served the best hot chocolate, or in later years an opera house or ballet to go to.
Also, if there are any books for their age about where you are going, reading those beforehand is always fun, as is renting a movie filmed there, or simply showing them some art books or history books with photos of some things you might see. My kids were always excited when in later years they studied many of the things we would have seen and places they actually walked - living history so to speak.
Nothing like family and travel, for us anyway.
An Unusual Misspelling Adventure
I sent a press release to friends and family about a week ago announcing the one year anniversary of the FamilyRoadTrippers blog when one of the recipients wrote back telling me that when she clicked the link for the blog's home page, she was directed to a bible college web site.
Huh?
I went back to the original email and clicked through. Sure enough, I was directed to this site.
As it turns out, I mistyped the URL, by accidentally omitting the "s" in "blogspot." But why does the spelling error direct people to the bible college site? How does familyroadtrippers.blogpot.com possibly relate to bibledesk.com, the ones who seem to be taking advantage of poor typists?
To find out, I emailed them to ask:
Hello,
I'm a little confused about a URL that points to your website. When I misspelled my own URL (by accidentally omitting the "s" in "blogspot"), I was directed to your site (www.familyroadtrippers.blogpot.com). The page looked exactly the same as your www.bibledesk.com page, only it has my misspelled URL in it. Why does this happen? Did you register a misspelling of my site to attract unsuspecting familyroadtripper traffic to your site?
If so, why?
Thank you for helping me to clear this up,
Dan
I'll post their answer if and when I receive it. In the meantime, feel free to contact them to ask the same questions.
Oh, well. It takes all kinds I guess...
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