Staying Close to Family

We have lived all over the US and at time have not made it back home to visit family for very long periods of time.  We have found several ways to stay in touch with our families and keep them informed of our comings and goings and the special events in our lives. 

We use Skype for making video telephone calls to our parents and our children. When we are with our grandchildren, we can make video calls to our parents.  This allows them to see their great grandchildren.  Video adds so much to a telephone call.

There are also many social networking sites available that let you send quick updates to your friends and family.  Twitter and Facebook are just a few ways to stay in contact, beyond the obvious solution of making telephone calls. We are new to both Twitter and Facebook, but have that they have great advantage.  While our kids are terrible at answering our emails.  They are very active on Facebook and Twitter, posting pictures and messages for their friends.  Belonging to these two social networking sites, allows us to see pictures of our children and grandbabies that they post for their friends, but sometimes fail to take the time to send to Mom and Dad (And thank God that our kids are beyond the embarassing College Spring Break Days and posting pictures that they will someday be ashamed of).  

Photo storage sites like SmugMug and Picasa allow us to upload tons of pictures and add descriptive notes that tell the story behind the pictures.  We also have an add-on accessory that enables our camera to "geotag" our pictures so that our friends and family members can see where we took the picture on Google Maps.  In a way, this helps them follow us on our adventures.  My Dad was a truck driver and has been all across the US, so he and my mother get a kick out of seeing where we have been.  SmugMug has an unlimited storage plan that allows us to keep all of our photos online, so we don't have to tote around boxes of pictures.  We can just sent our friends and families an email with a link to the photos, so we don't have to try to attach them to an email . . . and they don't have to spend time trying to download pictures.

We also created a blog that allows us to write up articles about our adventures, telling about the interesting sites we have seen. We insert pictures and links to our picture galleries. 

All and all, we have a great time staying connected to our loved ones using some of these tools. 

Resources for Successfully Living the Mobile Lifestyle