Friday 20 June 2008 - Mobile Blogging and An Italian Border Route

I’ve just spent an arduous period on the phone to Orange, in an effort to clarify the cost of blogging from abroad over the next few weeks.
There seemed to be some uncertainty as to whether or not an email was technically a text message, and how it would be charged.
The third operative I spoke to was (helpfully) very clear about it. I hope I don’t have to use this blog entry as evidence to reduce my bill when I get back!
Emails to the blog will be charged at £3 per MB, and I’m assured that about 80 pages of text constitutes a MB. The cost is cumulative, so it seems I can produce about 25 pages of text for £1, or is there a minimum charge of £3? Other charges are shown above.
Anyway, it shouldn’t be as expensive as I’d expected, and I might even be able to add a low resolution image occasionally when there’s a good signal. But I don’t intend to spend hours on the tops of mountains trying to transmit huge messages like I did on the TGO Challenge!
So, WD, I shouldn’t be needing your help in uploading the blog. But you never know, if the emails don’t work I’ll have to resort to texting (SMS - Short Message Service) someone in the UK who can upload to this web page, or MMS (Multi-media Messaging Service) may work – it certainly worked direct to the blog when I tested it earlier.

So one way or another we can keep in touch.

I’ve decided to leave the ‘GTA’ (Grand Traversata Delle Alpi) flag on the blog – though I won’t be able to insert the flag remotely – as that route inspired the planned walk. Our latest plan includes only 13 of the 47 GTA stages detailed in Gillian Price’s Cicerone Guide.

We're planning on staying much closer to the border, and crossing over to France in places, so it’s very much ‘An Italian Border Route’.

Apart from the GTA, our planned route includes sections from the following trails:
Alta Via dei Monte Liguri
Via Alpina (surprisingly little of this, and the Via Alpina web pages are not really very helpful) Tour du Chambeyron
Tour of the Queyras
Haute Route Glaciere
Alta Via Delle Valle D’Aosta No 1
Tour of Mont Blanc
Alta Via Delle Valle D’Aosta No 2 – Alta Via dei Gigante
Tour of Monte Rosa

A mouth watering prospect!

800 kilometres (500 miles) and including around 60,000 metres (60 kilometres!) of ascent - in 56 days including 11 rest days.