Family Recreation

I'm a man of my word - a few too many words if truth be told. Back in Chile I promised the kids that on our return to Cork I would invest in a game of table soccer (or taca-taca as the Chileans had it). Yesterday, already a bit ragged from my first week's work, I stopped off in Lidl supermarket to buy their special offer. That Lidl had table soccer as a special offer was in itself a sign. It was meant to be. This sport of kings, now our official family sport, was destined to work its way into our home.

Who would have thought that the buggers weighed so much, though. Even with a strapping Pole by the name Piotr helping me to carry it out of the shop, I nearly became the first fatality ever recorded in the annals of the sport of taca-taca, almost flattened by a flatpack. It would have been an honourable exit to be sure, but somewhat premature in my table-soccer career (ah yes I remember Lawlor, they would say, full of promise but never made it out of the carpark).

It seems that fragments of our journey are trying to make their way back to us. After I finished putting together the table, I headed out to buy some beer. What should wink at me from the shelf but a six-pack of James Boag - a fine and flavourful Tasmanian beer which kept us good company on many's the evening in Oz. Let me tell you now that there are very few things as satisfying as a good beer to wash down a resounding taca-taca victory over people half your size and a quarter your age.

This isn't just recreation, it's a recreation of our journey. The fastest, most chaotic way to play taca-taca is in four - the speed is a multiple of a two-person game. When the four of us are around the table we are suddenly back on the road, back in our Fiji sandals or our Chilean boots, screaming our heads off.

It's not that I'm suffering from nostalgia for the road - at least not yet. The only thing I really miss since we came back - and especially since I returned to the office - is my girls. They were the stars of this show. It wasn't perfect - there were many problems along the way. But it was real. By the time our journey was over we had a slightly different way of communicating - a better one. A number of people have asked us, since our return, how we coped with the logistics of travelling with children for so long. The truth is that logistics is what we do at home. During what little time that I can afford each day with Nina and Sara, I typically spend it managing them. Telling them what to do. Mealtimes, tidying up, bedtime - family life can be very regimented. Of course we had to do these things on the road as well, but there was always loads of time left over. Time to explore together places where none of us know what we would see. Time to talk through problems and disagreements rather than to just issue parental diktats on the way out the door. Time to just hang out and begin to actually enjoy each other's company, and learn a little more about each other as people.

These are things that cannot survive the return home in their entirety. There's too much competition. The girls want to spend time with their friends, and I'm missing 40 hours a week. But we've noticed some changes. Since we got back, Nina and Sara are willing to spend a little more time with us, forgoing time with their mates. And with the memory of the trip as a reference point, a living example, we can reach for other, better ways of communicating rather than the rushed staccato set-pieces of the past.

So when it is just the four of us, around the taca-taca table, screaming, twisting, punching the air in triumph or burying our faces in our hands - we could be anywhere. It doesn't really matter where we are. The spirit of the trip returns with a speed and strength that makes me think that it will never be far from the surface.

AirPort Express on the Road

There are going to be places - hotels and houses - that won't have wifi. This wouldn't be a big deal if we were taking a laptop with us, but we're not. We're taking the Nokia n800 which uses either wifi to a network or bluetooth to a mobile with a data connection. Another reason for wifi being so important is that we also have a wifi phone (thanks to Pat in Cubic Telecom - keep an eye on these guys as they're extending their reach West across the Atlantic) . The costs of voip are so low in comparison to anything else, that it makes sense to offset the cost of internet connectivity by making it wirelessly available whereever we have it.

Enter Apple's AirPort Express. What's so good about it? Well, it's exactly the right piece in this jigsaw. I don't want a wireless router - where ever I'll be will at least have a dsl modem. Moreover, it's tiny. It has no cables - the electrical plug is part of the box itself:

You plug this little device into the wall, connect your dsl router with an ethernet cable, and watch the light turn green. Easy. It does a lot more than this - it's designed to work within an AirPort network which means all kinds of cool things - some of which I'll definitely use this for when we get back. For example, you can plug this into the wall near your stereo, and connect them to each other view the jack connection on the AirPort express. Next time you're using iTunes on any computer in the network, you can direct the signal out of whichever instance of AirPort express you want. You can similarly connect to any USB compatible printer. Moreover, you can harness a couple of separate AirPort Expresses together in one wireless network, extending the range of your network (this is something that I'll certainly be trying in our Cagliari apartment where the think concrete walls tend to block radio signals.)

Telecoms on the Trip: MaxRoam vs Vodafone

Skype will be the preferred method of communication wherever possible, but we'll need a fallback of mobile phones. The solution we'll go with in the end is a new product that's just come on the market. By complete coincidence they are based right here in Cork, Ireland. The company is called Cubic Telecom and their product is MaxRoam.

I've done as detailed a comparison as possible between using MaxRoam and sticking with Vodafone (with Passport), which I'll share with you below. The idea with MaxRoam is that you buy a SIM (for around Euro 25) and use this instead of your normal SIM. Cubic Telecom offer very low prices - based I belive on them finding the cheapest routes from where you are standing to where you want to call. I assume this is mostly using VOIP, but I honestly don't know. An added benefit is that you can associate more than one number from more than one country to a single SIM. That means that I can (have, in fact) bought a SIM and attached an Irish and Italian number to it. So not only will it cost us less to roam, it'll cost our respective families in Cork and Cagliari less too.

Vodafone's passport program is a vast improvement on what they used to offer to travelers. If you go to a covered country (and use a Vodafone partner network), you pay a fixed charge for incoming calls regardless of how long you spend on the phone, and you pay that same charge on outgoing calls, plus a per-minute charge the same as you would get back home (i.e. if you weren't roaming). However Passport is only available on a monthly payment contract, doesn't cover SMSs and doesn't let you use the free minutes of your package.

I've tried to calculate how much we are likely to spend in Australia and China for starters, but those results can be extrapolated to the other destinations. I've put together three possible usage plans representing three possible patterns of use that we might put our mobile phones to while on the road. All the details can be read on this Google spreadsheet right here. They get progressively more intensive, and Usage Plan 2 is heavily geared towards SMS message sending.

First Australia - all prices in Euros:

Note that this assumes that I'm always on a Vodafone partner network.

China, where Passport is not available, is more telling:



In the case of China, Vodafone would appear to cost me more that twice MaxRoam's service. To see the details of the Usage Patterns, and the calculations on which I based these graphics, see the spreadsheet. Do let me know if you think I've done either option some injustice.

As a general disclaimer, I'd like to say that these calculations are as accurate as I need to make them in order to choose a telecoms solution. I am not offering them as a definitive guide to either service. See the respective sites for the full details.

My alternative laptop

There it is - my alternative laptop. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, with a foldable Freedom Universal bluetooth keyboard (folds to half it's length). I've added a pen to give an idea of scale (it's a one-meter long pen, though - naaah, just kidding).

I spent an entire weekend trying to follow instructions on how to install the driver for the keyboard, but they are now working nicely together.

The screen has a terrific resolution which makes a big difference in terms of usability. There are dedicated buttons to toggle in and out of fullscreen mode, and to zoom in and out as well. The habit of reaching for a mouse is unlearned quickly thanks to the combination of the fullsize keyboard (with important shortcuts) and the touch screen. There is also a choice of two styles of on-screen keyboard: my favourite is the larger of the two - it takes up nearly all the screen and allows you to thumb the keys easily, or even quasi-touch type.

The built-in browser is Opera, but it's possible to replace the rendering engine with a Mozilla one. I've done this, and now I can use Ajax-based websites very easily, including Google Documents - an important part of out planned travel software solution. And of course it works well for blogging too. The next blog entry I write here will be from the N800.

As for memory, I plan to spend some money on MicroSDs. My camera takes Memorystick Pro Duo and the N800 takes SD. So the most convenient way of transferring from one to the other (for the purpose of viewing, blogging, or uploading to Google Pictures) is to transfer MicroSD cards from one to the other by means of MicroSD-to-SD and MicroSD-to-ProDuo converters. I guess it beats hauling a hard disk around with me. I'll have to keep an eye out for a convenient microSD container to hold a large number of them together. They seem particularly fragile and easy to lose.

It's not a laptop, and there's no point in pretending otherwise. It'll seem slow and hard to read compared to the normal laptop experience. But it comes in at less that 500 euros including the keyboard, can (and will!) be carried in a jacket pocket, and also runs skype. An excellent travel communication and journaling kit, all in all.

Speaking of communication, I've just bought a SIM from a new Irish service called MaxRoam which will keep the phone bill way down both for ourselves and anyone who wants to contact us. I'll blog on this later this week.