Dear family and friends

We offer here an account of the progress we have made on our trip so far.

 

You will find this account to be somewhat technical in nature.  What we have done is to use Google Earth and Picasa Web Albums, combined, to display both our track across the continent and also a sampling of our pictures as taken each day along the way.

 

You may view the pictures alone, very straight forwardly, by visiting our Picasa Web Album site, where they are organized by the week.  Each picture has a caption providing a bit of narrative.

 

However, if you would like to have what we think is a richer experience, you can download a 'kmz' file and open it in Google Earth.  To download the file, click here.   (Please be patient, the file is a biggie.)

Once you have opened the kmz file, Google Earth will display not only the track of our trip so far but also tiny 'thumb nails' of our pictures located on the track where they were taken.  If you click on a thumb nail it becomes somewhat larger image that provides better detail.  And if you click on this larger image you will be taken to Picasa Web Albums and to the actual picture itself.  (To do all this, you must have Google Earth installed on your PC.  This application can be downloaded from www.google.com/earth.)

 

Having arrived at Picasa Web Albums in this fashion you may view the other pictures there in the usual way or you can click a tab which takes you back to Google Earth.

 

You will find that the track in Google Earth is truly where we have gone each day, for it was created using a GPS device that records our coordinates every five seconds throughout the entire day.  Consequently, you can see not only the 'big picture' of our whole trip but also can 'zoom in' to see every little detail, for example right down to the camp site we had in Kelona.  Optionally, you can display the place name of each spot we reached at the end of every day (click 'Place' in each week in the left panel).

 

Why have we done this?  One might ask:  why put on skis and throw oneself down a hill?  In our case it`s the fun of trying something that exercises our abilities in using this intriguing technology.  However, another, more compelling reason is we think that months from now, on cold winter nights when we're happily re-living the journey, all this data we have collected will bring the trip back to us much more vividly than pictures alone.

 

So to you, dear visitors to this Web site, we send the wish that this rather different account will allow you to share more intimately our enjoyment of this adventure as it is happening.

 

A final note about the track itself:  we managed to hit every relative west of the Lakehead!  (And some IBM ex-colleagues as well.)  The meandering of our route, consequently, permitted us to catch these folks when each was available - whilst still taking in all sights that we intended to see (and lots more that came as lovely surprises).

Mike and Sue