So, our last full day in Istanbul.  Yesterday was shopping and touring; today we’d hit the two biggest and most recognized mosques in the city and also the impressively preserved Topkapi Palace, former residence of the Ottoman Sultans.

But before I start, two lessons learned on this first major world voyage whilst maintaining my blog:

A.  As much as I love my iPad, it’s a pain in the arse for blogging while traveling.  I can write on it no problem, but working on the WordPress site is a major hassle: the text entry window is tiny and inserting then sizing images is cumbersome and nearly impossible.

B.  Plus, I’m taking my high quality photos with my digital SLR Sony camera.  To transfer those images requires a USB port, which the iPad doesn’t have, so I ended up downloading those to Nancy’s laptop anyway, which meant my typical blog-posting process sequenced as follows:

• freehand drafting and note-taking in a spiral journal,
• typing that up via iPad,
• hoping for a wireless signal to then email that document to myself,
• recovering that email on Nancy’s laptop,
• loading photos from my camera to Nancy’s laptop,
• integrating both to WordPress when an Internet signal was available,
• final drafting, then posting.

Compared to my usual process . . . this was 4-5 times more time-consuming.

Next time I’ll bring my own laptop and I’ll know better how to tap into the Net outside of the U.S.

Okay, back to Istanbul.

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