This really isn't a truly review - we just want to get as many people as possible to have a peek at this site and to use this brilliant idea for themselves. It is essentially an online diary so all your friends and relatives can plot your progress as you travel all over Oz. Below is the Gossies pre-amble and an explanation of their philosophy. The site will give a very good idea on the best caravan parks. For newbies it will give you a very good idea of what life touring in an A'van is really like.

Keeping in Touch

When we're off on our many A'van trips we like to keep in touch with family and friends back home and give them some idea of what we're doing. Of course there's all the usual methods, phone, mobile, letter, postcard, email etc. We've tried them all; they all have a part to play and we continue to use them. However, this year we came up with a new one: our own internet blogger site (in net jargon, blogging means web logging). To be more explicit, we post an entry on a site which only we can control but anyone with internet access can read. All we have to do is give our family and friends the URL of our site and they can check us out anytime they like. We try to add a new entry about once a week depending on our location and the proximity of an internet café.

We carry a laptop computer with us to prepare each entry on a floppy disk. This saves time (and money) when it comes to posting the Blog, usually less than 10 minutes, and it enables us to prepare entries at our leisure. Every evening we try to add a little to our next entry; in this way it tends to be less of a chore.

Blogs can also be posted from mobile phones set up with internet access. Alternatively Blog entries can be typed in directly at the internet café; however they need to be concise to avoid costly access as charges are time based.

Since our Blog site is effectively exposed to the whole world, we tend to adopt a somewhat less personal style than in other private forms of communication.

The chief downside of blogging, to "keep in touch" is that, by nature, it's a monologue communication. On the upside it provides us with a complete record of a trip, and there's all kinds of reasons why we want to review information on past trips. Every trip has been a series of unique experiences, some we may never repeat. For this reason alone, we feel compelled to maintain a journal in some form or other. Even before the days of internet and A'vans we kept trip journals in exercise books.

If you'd like to view our Blog site click on http://gossiesontour.blogspot.com (no www). To get the full story, go back through all the archived logs.

Phyllis & John Gosbell