East Getting Your Vehicle In and Out of Many Countries
Pictures of the carnets and details about carnets

Checklists.

What should I bring? Everyone has a tendency to bring too much stuff. Just remember, many of the places you visit are more populated than your home. And more people means they probably have what you need so, consider getting items you need on the road. After days of carrying your pack around, sifting through items you never use to find the few that you rely on, you might also conclude that less is better. Take a look at the Gear We Brought and the Vehicle Spare Parts list to see what we found useful.

Developing a process for producing AroundTheWorld1999 was one of the most critical elements of this projects success and it took a long time. If this was to be a travel oriented web site we needed to focus our efforts on the area of the site that would contain the majority of our content. This was a set of pages we call the Route and Journal. If this was to be an educational web site we needed to also focus on delivering kid-friendly content that is salient to our audience. This spurred the ask a question link. We quickly realized that like a business, we needed a mission statement to keep our focus so one night, Nick came up with this:

Our Mission:
It¹s a good idea to go into something like this with some understanding of what you want to get out of it. Our mission is basically to see neat stuff and, in so doing, to spark the idea of world travel into the minds of young people. We targeting elementary school, 5th grade up including High School and College. -To let Americans know that foreign travel to other countries (like Iran for example) is safe. We have our media to thank for all the fear but realize that most of it exists to sell us things. To offer reference and research material for adventurers, travelers, vehicle overlanders, and expeditions. To provide adventurous and entertaining reading for Land Rover owners and vehicle off-road enthusiasts. To encourage and educate anyone considering a vehicle based overland expedition. Please contact us if you need help.
-To recruit a team for our next expedition; AroundTheWorld2001: LONGITUDE!
-To encourage people to follow their dreams. Sappy but it¹s true. Stop watching other people live their lives and go live your own!

Building The Web site Infrastructure to Support an Expedition
We could have hosted our site on a shared virtual server. There are many travel sites that will host your travelogues for you and most of them are free. However, we decided to host our own web site. The infrastructure for AroundTheWorld1999.com includes server hardware and software that runs the actual web site. We built our own server at home using a old homemade Pentium system and a DSL line. It didn¹t have to be powerful but it had to be reliable and remote administration was especially important. One thing that you get with your own machine is flexibility and control so you can experiment. Key features we wanted:
- Web Server
- Mail Server
- remote access (telnet for remote systems admin.)

The server hardware is nothing special: a Pentium 200MHz with 64 megabytes of RAM and a 10 gig hard drive. It was thrown together using bits and pieces of hardware that were lying around.

Several months before we left, the machine was setup. After formatting the drive we installed FreeBSD. It was quick and easy. Simply download two floppies, boot, and perform an "Internet Installation" which grabs the OS pre-installation files using FTP. How cool; The OS downloads and installs itself. It¹s easy and it¹s free! Within an hour we had Apache web server, SendMail, FTP, and DNS configured and running. Everything you need to host domains, web services, remote admin., file transfer and e-mail. With stability to boot. In one year of uptime it has been rebooted it five times and never due to system failure. I like Windows NT because it pays the bills. In fact, I know more about the Windows environment having worked extensively with Internet Information Server and all versions of Microsoft Exchange but you just can¹t beat a Unix solution for Internet applications. System stability and remote administration widens the gap even further. Where we¹re going we won¹t be around to reboot Windows NT server every week.

I highly recommend this combination. Especially if you want to learn more about all aspects of web publishing. For better and worse, you will have total control over everything. Just make sure you have a friend back home occasionally checking the system and a "plan B" in case of system failure. .

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