Staying in Touch - Gap Year Emails

"Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversations." - Elizabeth Drew

When you leave home family will be hugging you with tears in their eyes, 'We love you and PLEASE keep in touch,' they'll cry.

Friends will have tearful and envious farewells and beg you to keep in contact, 'Please WRITE!!' they'll say emphatically.

And they'll mean it.

Until they get your first four page email. To begin with they will read with enthusiasm but after the third email their heart will sink when they see your name in the inbox and they will simply skim through all the words that you spent hours composing!

Do your friends and family a favour. A short and sweet email saying, 'Hi, we're good, alive and leaving here to get to here,'. This is fine.
If they really want to know what you ate for breakfast, how much your taxi ride cost and how rude the waiter was they will go to your blog/facebook etc.

Okay, I do exaggerate slightly and there will be some family and friends that long to hear about every step of the adventure but it is just as important to remember that for many of your friends short and sweet will work best.

Your mantra should be little and often - it will win you lots of brownie points.

Staying in touch

Of course it works both ways too and you will long to hear about the goings on from home.

The day to day minutiae, the small stuff. The bin men came today, it's raining, Josie got the merit badge at school, Johnny lost a tooth, Sam's boss is away ... You will long to hear this sort of stuff but for most of the people back home it will seem superficial and, in light of your adventures, beyond trivial.

They will also feel inadequate and unable to meet the standard and goings on in the mini novel they have just received from you.

So they wont really email you much and you will feel neglected.

So keep it frequent, short and sweet and tell them before you leave that you really want to hear all about their small stuff too.

Your Email Address

Do yourself a favour and set up one of the above email accounts before you leave so you can collect your email from any computer in the world. You can also use the storage space on that email address to store phone numbers, itinerary, address and travellers cheque numbers, bank numbers etc.

We all had our own yahoo email accounts and we all stored scans of important documents on our emails but for bank account info I divided the info between the three email accounts so if we did get 'hacked' getting the important info wasn't going to be a walk in the park for the b******s.

NB For the scans of our important documents we did not call them scans of important documents!

We also made sure that we knew each others passwords and usernames just in case.