Since this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, we want to share it with family and friends and keep a permanent record of our adventures.   In the old days, we would have had the kids keep a journal.  Today we blog.  Each of us will be posting our experiences here on the-breens.com as we make our way through eight weeks of European experiences.

We’re bringing along a few technology tools to help us keep the blog and capture the trip.  First off, each member of the family has their own iPhone.  Mine and Mallory’s have been unlocked, so we’ll be buying native SIM cards with local phone numbers for calling and texting to each other if we split up.  These iPhones will serve as our primary cameras, though I’m bringing along my venerable Nikon D80 DSLR as well.

We also each have iPads which we’ll use for the actual blog writing using a WordPress-specific app called BlogPad Pro.  This $4.99 app handles everything we need to post to our blog, including adding pictures, links, responding to comments, etc.  There is a small learning curve to set it up and get started, but it’s easy once you figure it out.

Getting photos off the SD card on my Nikon is done with an ingenious product called the Kensington Digital Mobilelite.  This little $40 gadget does some amazing tricks.  It has an SD card slot and a USB port, and it broadcasts a secure WIFI hotspot to up to five devices.   We’ll be popping in a 64GB SD card filled with movies on long flights so that each of us can stream a different movie to our iPads.   Great for passing those airplane hours.  I can also plug my Nikon directly into the device to copy my day’s pictures to a backup SD card and then browse the pictures wirelessly from an iPad for inserting into the blog.  I’ve tested this a few times and it works without a hitch.  I could have bought an Apple SD card adapter for the iPad, but that wouldn’t have given us the neat movie watching capability or wireless photo browsing.  I think this Kensington device is a hit.

Getting photos off our iPhones and actually publishing the blog entries to our WordPress site will need internet access. In our 20+ stops, we have free WIFI in all but one of them, so this shouldn’t be an issue.

So that’s the tech we’re packing along.  We’ll keep you posted on how all this actually works on the road.  Can’t wait to start!

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