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The website
"Exploring Portugal in forty five days", "Exploring Italy & Sicilia in sixty days", "Exploring Sardinia in fifty days" and "Exploring more of Portugal in sixty days" are four diary websites that are still not completely finished. As long as I'm involved in many other projects, this website will suffer from unfinished diary reports. It's not only the lack of creating inspiration, there is also too little time, because I've always been and still am, an incorrigible time optimist with too many projects. Every new journey requires a new journal and creating something new is more fun than completing former websites.
I have no reason to reinvent the wheel so with last year's website as a basis, it is pretty easy to make a new one. In my professional conduct, evaluation and development were watchwords but now that I’m about to go consuming, rather than nourishing, I am happy to lean back and think that the site is fine as it is, until further notice. We'll see along the way, what I can come up with! Our actual position will still be evident in the ongoing story by latitude- and longitude entries and this position may in many cases leed to links in Google Maps with the option to images on our current location in Street View.
Sources
Both the preparatory work on the page and the daily story of the unique places where we are, demands to find out the facts. In English it is called "research", the search for knowledge. To bring all the books from the bookshelf at home, dealing with our destinations, would weigh down the motorhome too much. We use five travelguides: "FirstClass" (SE), "Capitool" (NL), "Fyris" (SE), "Berlitz" (SE) and "WOMO, Mit dem Wohnmobil nach X" (DE). In addition to these books, we collect a lot of factual knowledge on the internet where Wikipedia is the most important source.
Diaries
We did never succeed in collecting and completing pictures and diaries of our adventures in albums, like most people used to do, “in the old days”. The pictures ended up in shoeboxes, along with incomplete diaries written in a variety of (paper-)notebooks, which all are hidden somewhere in the attic.
With today's technology it is much easier and more fun doing the documentation of our travelling on this website and it is easy to follow along daily, as we're on the road. Besides this, all documentary fits on one single DVD-disc for posterity. No more shoeboxes! |
Languages
In the motorhome we speak primarily Swedish and it would be most convenient for us even to write the website in Swedish. However, our international relatives and circle of acquaintances do not all, understand Swedish. Translations from Swedish to English or Dutch with Microsoft's or Google's translation functionality are often incomprehensible. The entire site will therefore continue to be written in English and former written parts in Swedish will be translated into English, when the time is found. It's just a matter of equality! Most Swedes read and understand English just as well as the Dutch do.
This site is not a Blog, it's our travel diary
Some of our "readers" wondered why we did not have a blog so they had the opportunity to comment and ask questions directly. Well, we do not like blogs and we refuse to submit to the commercialized trend to accept advertising among our own text and pictures. In my opinion, blogs do have incorrect structures, and are chronologically, unsystematic. In addition, we do not like the personal conversation to become public. A traditional website provides us, an easier control of words and images and offers more opportunities to use the material for other applications.
We avoid posting pictures of and text by others than ourselves, without permission. Other peoples privacy is just as important to us as our own personal integrity! Anyone wishing to contact us, feel free to email or phone, see the Contact & Links.
Purpose
The main objective of this site is still, leaving a "footprint" of our small adventures to our grandchildren, children, relatives, friends, acquaintances and others who may wish to take advantage of our MH trips around the Mediterranean. We also hope that other mobile home owners manage to find some "useful information" in this diary story.
The bottom line
This website does not claim to be anything else than being a record of a travel story in diary form. Eventually it will enter into, and become part of, a larger future context.
Updated: 4 July 2013, JvH |
