Staying in Touch

Update: This blog post was written back in 2011. While it is mainly still correct, it may be a little out of date. You can find more up to date information about staying in touch while on the road in the ‘How To’ section of this blog – see the menu above.

Our thoughts on staying in touch with friends and family while on the road:

• We use this blog and update it every day. Most similar blogs we know of update every few days, weeks or months. I guess that (a) we’re still keen as we’ve only just started (b) we really love getting comments on our posts and (c) we find it helps our families to know we’re nice and safe with regular updates

• WiFi takes some effort to find. Once we’ve found it, it is proving to often be unreliable and slow. At the site we’re currently on, you have to be sat right outside the office to get a signal, and even then my laptop refuses to connect. Our smart phone does connect, but it’s very slow. McDonalds provide free WiFi and it works well. We’ve used this from a nearby car park, using a booster aerial. Have a look at www.doyourdream.co.uk for point of interest files for your sat nav or Autoroute, or just keep your eye our for the legendary golden arches

• If you can afford it, you can get satellite Internet systems which work using a roof-mounted dish. www.theworldisourlobster.com are the only people I know with one fitted. I’ve seen the dish plus a contract for about £1500, plus fitting. I’ve no idea how well these work but I suspect they’re by far the best way of guaranteeing a decent Internet connection from pretty much anywhere, anytime

• We use Vodafone Data Traveller for our Internet access. We have a £10.50 SIM from Vodafone, plus a £10 a month Data Traveller bolt-on. This gives us 25MB a day in all the European countries we plan to visit. PLEASE NOTE – We’ve just received a text (25 June 2012) stating that from 1 July 2012 the EU Regulatory changes mean the cost of Data Traveller will jump from £10 a month to £3 a day. We can no longer recommend it until we know the full situation. It means we can move between countries with no faffing about trying to buy local SIMs. We got this tip from www.europebycamper.com and we’ve found it to be really good in France and Spain – we’ve only once failed to get a cellular network signal, even finding fast connections (3G and HSDPA) on campsites or farms in the middle of nowhere. 25MB isn’t much, but it’s enough for email, blog updates and emergency map hunting for garages or using Google Translate to get our message across to the locals. We have a metering app on the phone to keep tabs on the data we’ve used, and Vodaphone send you a text when you hit 20MB. So far we’ve only gone over the allowance once, by accidentally downloading a load of application updates on the same day. Also, you can’t tether the phone to your laptop, but with only 25MB the only real issue there is the fact you have to type on the tiny phone keyboard

• Travelling companions www.goalgetting.co.uk put us onto another Internet phone system called Viber. We’ve not used it much so can’t comment on how well it works; it’s worth a look

• We don’t make many phone calls; but we have found Skype to work quite well. We have it installed on our HTC Desire and we use your Vodaphone Data Traveller internet allowance for making calls and sending texts. Calls to other Skype users are free, texts and calls to non-Skype phones costs money, but less than the SIM provider rates (I pay 5.6p per SMS text to the UK). We’ve managed just the one Skype video call back home in 40 days, but that was sat in a tiny dark open-to-the-elements room on a campsite and it wasn’t a smooth experience