Searching for good, not upscale family travel

In order to provide some semblance of structure to my travel research, I’ve decided to research travel in the areas in parallel with the current agenda.  It’s January 19th and I’ve still not posted anything about Thailand’s famous beaches.  I’m not sure how the month got away from me, but I can  pretty much guarantee that I won’t let a similar thing happen on the actual trip.

I think it’s obvious that we’re going to try to avoid the drunken insanity that defines much of the commonly held view of the Thailand beaches.  I haven’t yet found a good way search the web for travel information that applies to families, and not the previously referenced inebriated masses.  By entering the word “family” in the search terms I’ve found that you tend to get upscale, wholly controlled experiences.  Isn’t there some sort of happy medium?   When my wife and I visited Europe on our honeymoon in the mid 90′s before the web had evolved, we had a similar experience with guidebooks.  What we learned is that we had to show up at the local visitor’s station and ask for the right kind of reasonably priced accommodations.  That was a start, but we didn’t find the right kind of matches until we started using the work “quiet.”  Somehow, that seemed to be the magic word for finding unique accommodations that were just slightly off the beaten path.  Surely there must be a similar web term…

Looks like I should prepare for doing some non-traditional web-based research to ferret out this information.  My hope is that this site will evolve into something of a forum where first person research can be found and shared.

Geotagging with Eye-Fi

Capturing the memories of our trip is one of my top priorities. Surely, the trip will make an indelible impression that we’ll carry with us in many ways after it is over. However, to maximize retention and share our experiences with our friends, I have just begun to research the emerging capabilities that are available to us. One thing that this preliminary investigatioon has done already is to open my eyes to the amazing scope of the impact of digital technologies.

Eye-Fi Explore SD cards are one of those things. Not only do these cards allow you to wirelessly upload your digital photos to your computer or photo sharing sites, but it also adds Geotags via the Skyhook network (the same one used by the iPhone.) Unfortunately reviews for the product are mixed. Popular tech commentator Walter Mossberg didn’t quite rave about the product in his review of August 2008. The good news is that I’ve got a couple of years for this functionality to improve.

What’s there to read?

The primary purpose of this blog is to start a discussion about extended family travel with children. My family and I are in the planning phases of a one year trip around the world. On this site, I’m posting all of my collected research to keep a record of it and to hear you opinions. The world is a big place and we hope that you’ll help us explore it!

Before you’re ready to dig in, here’s a few questions that may be wondering:
Why?
Where?
What?

Sticky Posts and Blog Traffic

I’ve been trying to figure out how to order to posts differently and I happened upon this idea of a sticky post.  Basically it keeps the post at the top of a category page and improves your keyword relevance – whatever that means.  It didn’t quite solve my problem, but anyway, here is a good article on why you’d want to make a sticky post.

So after doing some surfing at the above link, I also came across this really detailed post around how to generate traffic. Man, there is a lot more to this blogging thing than I thought. Although I’m starting to think that there may be more blogs about blogs than there is anything else, as evidenced by this post!

The other ironic thing is that every time I run spell check, it tells me blog isn’t a word.  Now that is funny!