The internet
Being connected is really important! When I was travelling alone I would have been a wreck without the internet. Keeping me in touch with friends and family gave me a lot of strength during some dark lonely days. It's also critical for attraction research and navigation!
I wanted to use my cellphone for connectivity, and since I wasn't leaving the UK I just went to phones4u and enquired about plans. T-Mobile had a great plan with unlimited data bandwidth, tethering permitted, for £23 a month. And they use EE, Orange and T-Mobile towers so have pretty good coverage across the UK. I had to bend the rules a little and provide my friends address in London, but otherwise no worries! A monthly plan too, I can cancel any month - no catch. I watched way too much netflix on it and they throttled my speed for a month (and refused to admit as much) but otherwise, perfect deal.
The tools
There are a few pieces of tech I couldn't do without on the tour:
1. The smartphone
Critical kit! In the top right you can see the wee wireless icon - it's set as a wireless router. So through it you can connect everything to the net - the kindle, laptop and Kate's gizmos - all through the phone. The UK has pretty good 4G phone coverage and with that, you're home and hosed. It is also used as the GPS navigation for the van and phone calls (they still do those) and everything really. Must keep the battery charged at all times because wireless routing and GPS kill it in no time at all!
2. The Laptop
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| I stuck some apple stickers on it to make it look crappier than it is. |
The laptop! You know what they're for - everything. It's also been useful for charging the other devices via USB. It has one port that charges USB even when the laptop is off - a super-handy feature for keeping the smartphone at 100% overnight so you're ready to rock in the morning.
The only particularly motorhome thing I've done with it is to set up a few more power plans - a 'motorhome 12v' plan, which turns it off pretty early and runs the CPU at about 10% (plenty for blogging and web browsing), and a 'low power always on' plan for occasional big-downloads or uploads on the road.
3. The camera
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| How did it take a photo of itself?! |
I've been using this camera pretty much non-stop for a year and I keep finding new features that rock about it. It fits in your pocket, has 10x optical zoom and a wide lens, can take HD video, all good. The only problem was my favouring of convenience over camera protection. This has led to it sucking pocket fluff in to the lens. I had it cleaned once but it still has crap in the centre of every photo! I see all these other people taking photos with iPads and cellphones and they're great in a pinch, but if you're on tour - take a proper camera. Dickheads.
4. The tablet
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| 7" Kindle fire HD |
Not really critical kit, but I won this wee 7" tablet at the learning and technologies conference. I never saw much of a use for tablets but it's been actually quite handy-mostly for watching shows without needing to use the laptop, which is far more power hungry! I know people love huge TVs, but we make do with a 7".
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| Amazing home cinema setup. |
Keeping stuff charged
It's like an IT shop in here, so how do we keep it all going?
For the cellphone, aside from USB power from the laptop, there's power from the cab battery here:
If you look closely you can see some real MacGyver shit going on here. The charging port in my phone has become extremely loose, so we've tied the charging point of the 12v car charger to the phone-holder suction cup bracket via a small piece of wire. You plug the phone in then push it down in the bracket and it holds the charger in while you're on the road.
You may also notice the suction cup is missing from the bracket. Not the finest craftsmanship on this piece of kit - but it still works, propped against the windscreen with a towel.
For the laptop, I have a 12v variable voltage charger. Outputs 19v, no idea how but it does! The wacky thing top right is an adapter the kind folks at Keene Campers threw together for me - so I can plug the laptop charger in to the habitation unit's two 12v sockets which are shaped differently. (Well, shaped much better than car 12v sockets, which are - let's face it - shit).
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| 12v laptop charger with socket adapter |
The habitation unit's juice is run off a battery under the passenger seat:
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It's just a regular car battery, not a deep-cycle battery as it should be - so the laptop has pretty much decimated its capacity in 6 months. Runs the water pump and lights fine, but the laptop punishes it a bit now - hence the increasing use of the kindle! The fuse is in that black connection at the front bottom - something I've blown a few times!
Finding camping spots
Wild camping has been the most enjoyable part of travelling in the van. You can stop where you want, when you want - you don't need to be places at a specific time or anything. It's so non-planning, it is so me. I've said it a million times but I can always say it again - best way to travel. Knowledge really is power in finding a good spot - here's how we do it.
Join Wildcamping.co.uk. It was £20 to join the forum, but once you do you can download a file of 'Places of Interest' (POI). You can open these files in any of the GPS navigation handsets (tomtom etc) and also in Google Earth on your phone.
Each of the points represent a potential place to stay for the night. In addition to this main file there are others - one for places in France and one for pubs which are happy for motorhomes to stay in their carparks.
So in Google Earth you can find your GPS location whenever you're done for the day, and check out places around where you are. They are coded - LR means 'Layby - Rural'. CU means 'Carpark - urban' and OR - other rural (usually a turning place for farming equipment, or road-maintenance vehicles/piles of gravel). You can zoom in and go to street view and take a look at the view to see if it's a nice quiet spot, or a bit shit.
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| Google Earth with a few of the POI marked around our campsite now. |
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| Zoomed in to one of the POI - a 'LR' - Layby rural. |
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| Street view of the layby. You can see it's right on the road - would do in a pinch, but probably a bit shit. |
The only bit I haven't figured out is how to transfer these points over to Google Maps - so once I find somewhere nice to stay for the evening, I need to manually do a bit of WW2 pilot navigator action and compare landmarks between Google Earth and Google Maps before I can pinpoint the spot for Google Maps to navigate me to. But that's how I do it, and we've stayed in some absolutely gorgeous places using this crowd-sourced knowledge of this fine country.
Navigation
Navigation with Google Maps and the cellphone has been really handy. You search for a thing, go 'direct me to here' and away you go.
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| Google maps doing its thing |
This is fantastic, but there are a few drawbacks:
- It needs data to work - when you have no cellphone coverage, you are screwed. This isn't such a problem until you lazily come to rely on it - but it will catch you out!
- It doesn't have much of a facility for customising your route. If you listen to Google blindly, you are sent up one lane wee 'short cuts' between major roads, rather than just taking major roads. You can see some neat stuff this way, but I've also put the van and myself in some harrowing situations by following a Google direction blindly!
The backup plan is an offline maps app - navfree.
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| navfree doing its thing |
You can download a country for free, then need to pay for additional countries - I downloaded the UK maps. As a proper nav system it computes the directions itself (no need for internet) - and you can customise it to do 'easy routes' and 'RV/Lorry routes' - which is ideal when you can't be assed with narrow lanes. The voice lady also sounds way hotter so it's a must. The only problem is the search function isn't great - you need to know where you want to be. Another benefit is that it tells you the speed limit of the road you are on, and your current speed via GPS tracking - cool!
But getting low-tech again, you can't beat a map. The OS touring maps provide lots of detail on the various attractions around, and between those and the rough-guides you can find heaps of good stuff.
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| The touring maps |
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| The various guide-books. |
The National Trust and English Heritage guidebooks have also been invaluable for researching area attractions.
Redundancy
I am an anxious, terrified little man. The thought of losing my precious memories in a van burglary used to spoil adventuring - I'd be worrying about the van being stolen the whole time. Then I set up my redundancies properly. Today I have a few methods.
Every few days I copy everything off the camera on to the laptop, coded into folders with the date and a description of the area. Occasionally I copy all of this onto a USB hard drive that is hidden in the van (incase the laptop is pinched).
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| Code the dates backwards, then you can order them by name and it'll be by actual date! |
This doesn't remove the risk of the entire van being stolen - but fortunately Google is there for you! With auto-backup, software automatically checks for new photos in specified directories and uploads them to your Google+ account when you have the internet working. Total peace of mind knowing no matter what happens to everything here, I'll have my pictures 'in the cloud' to get back later.
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| Google+ pictures backup setup. |
Blogging tools
GPS points
To get the GPS points of my trip onto my blog posts, it's a bit of a process!
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| Everywhere I've been since I started logging my movements. |
I have an app on my phone called 'GPSlogger'.
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| GPS logger doing its thing. |
Running on my phone all the time, every 2 hours this logs the GPS coordinates of the phone to a file. With a button click I can upload this file to my Google Drive account, which syncs over to the laptop. THEN I import that file in to Google Earth on the laptop, and can edit the timeline view to display the date range I want for that particular blog post. It's a bit of work but I know I will appreciate the effort when I come to review these adventures as an old man!
Getting pictures on the blog
To do this I use another of Google's pieces of software - Picasa. It's a photo-management software tool. Using Picasa I just select the photos I want to put on the blog, then click 'Share'. They get uploaded to my 'Picasa web albums'.
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| Photo being uploaded to picasa web album through Picasa |
Within the blogger blog-writing window, I can then add pictures from my 'Picasa web albums' - easy.
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| The 'picture-add' screen in Blogger. |
It's all a bit of a process but once you have it down (and provided the internet is working well) it's a piece of cake. Good times!
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That's it
Well this has been EXTREMELY ENJOYABLE for me, this huge IT nerd brain-dump. I don't blame you for skipping to the end to see if there's anything interesting. There isn't. Just Kate being silly.
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