| As with my kayak trips, we’ll be tracking hikes and walking with the Garmin eTrex 20.
The Garmin Basecamp software will handle editing the GPS track to remove the crap that shows up because I forget to turn it off or reset the track before starting. Basecamp will also be used to geotag our photos … assuming I remember to set the date/time on the camera when I change the battery. It’s 6-to-5 against and pick ‘em for that to happen. |
We take that for granted now, geotagged photos, or, at least, the younger generations do – that and the ability to document something with an, effectively, unlimited number of photos.
As I related in the first post here, my parents took road trips when I was young – this was in the early ‘70s mostly. I was at my mom’s recently, talking about this trip, and she pulled out the photo album for those road trips in the ‘70s. Two things struck me: for having spent weeks, maybe months, in some amazing places, there were very few photos and we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what state some of the pictures were from, much less where in the state.
Today, with 32GB SD cards selling for $25, is there ever a reason not to take a picture? With geotagged photos, will people a decade from now be able to conceive of not knowing, to the meter, where a photo was taken? Even without a dedicated GPS, phones tag their pictures and apps can log the location for later tagging.
That trip with my parents was forty years ago … forty years from now, instead of a few pages of yellowing photos in an album, this trip will still be documented with a Google Earth file with pristine copies of every photo included and exactly placed.
| Obviously we’ll need a way to blog while we’re on the road. I looked into tablets, but I’m a keyboard-guy … I don’t like the onscreen keyboards, at least for any significant amount of typing.
So we’ll be using an Acer Aspire One netbook along with a Logitech bluetooth trackball (I’m also not fond of pads). The car itself will be a rolling hotspot, provided through iPhone bluetooth tethering and AT&T. Which likely means there will be significant delays in some new posts as we roll through the dead areas where AT&T has no coverage. |
