Work,Youtube & Play At Lisbon Beach

Work,Youtube & Play At Lisbon Beach
July 1, 2008

Before heading to Lisbon from Evora, we
had checked our email at that
sweet new
cafe and were very puzzled because we had

Before heading to Lisbon from Evora, we had checked our email at that
sweet new cafe and were very puzzled because we had a ton from Youtube
and our "Where in Heaven is Mozart" video had gone from around 5000
views to almost 25, 000 in a couple of days. We were stunned as we had
never seen anything like it in the three months since we had first
posted our videos online.

There are so many videos made today that it is hard to even get them
seen as they get lost in the deluge of videos. We have seen lots of
great videos with ten to a hundred views  or such and sometimes
horrible ones with  hundreds of thousands of views, so there seemed no
rhyme or reason to the madness. Sexy cleavage or bikini shots seem to
be the top viewed even in the travel section.

We did have our violin world montage video featured for its first week
on Daily Motion and saw that it got over 13,000 views very quickly, so
knew that if it is seen, it is a popular and well liked video. We had
no idea why it was going through the roof suddenly on Youtube, but it
was having a huge affect on my email as I get a notice every time
someone makes a comment. At first, it did not look like it was featured
so I was puzzled as to what could be having this kind of effect, but
then we found out through a cyber friend that it was indeed being featured on
global Youtube.

This suddenly made an impact on our journey that was not expected. On
the way to Lisbon, we decided to find a place with wifi from our RV, so
we could take some time to handle all the email, catch up with our blog
work and take advantage of this Youtube feature and get up some more
videos. We had been wanting to get up some more videos before we left
Spain and some were almost ready to go. We have a ton more of videos
waiting to get up, but it takes time and effort. Having enough time to
deal with photos and videos has been a much bigger challenge than we
knew before starting this trip.

This would slow us down some and we have some pressure this year
because of the weather in northern Europe and our goal to return to
Spain by October, but we decided to take the risk. It is impossible to
tour, go fast, homeschool, play and keep up with internet duties like
the blog and email with any kind of equability, so we have to pick and
choose as we go and tend to divide things up. On days we do full tours,
we often don’t do much else as all the walking wears us out and the
same with driving days. In order to do this we would have to give up
touring and stay in one place for a while with good wifi from our RV.

Finding a place with wifi from the RV, even in Lisbon, was no easy
task. There are lots of campgrounds, just not with wifi. Internet cafes
are usually available, but often smoky, expensive and funky foreign
keyboards. We thought we had found one, but when we arrived, we found
out that it was only for tent campers. Luckily, they pointed us to
another one near by.

The bad news about the only place we could find was it was full of
static campers and was huge. This is common in Europe, especially in
resort areas, were city folks set up  a campsite with a permanent
caravan and elaborate accessories that they use as summer or get-away
cottages. We arrived on a weekday so no one was there at first and it
was down right spooky and felt like we were living in the twilight
zone. We were on the edge, but the place was gigantic and packed tight,
so it would be easy to get lost in the maze of empty parked caravans.

The wifi was also not the best, so that slowed things down considerably
as did the fact that we had more video than our computer memories could
take, which we must find a way to solve. So if you wonder why things
take a while to get up, the answer is that it is not that easy often
and everything is time consuming. We were very pleased that we managed
to get ten more videos up on Youtube and will eventually get them up on
our site as well. If you would like to see them check out our Youtube channel
and please subscribe and leave a comment!

Some are just quick moments like a recent balloon toss at one of
Mozart’s many sleep overs in Spain, or her reading in Spanish before
bed. Some are longer like one that showed her doing her live webcam
piano lesson between two continents or our Sahara montage. Hopefully,
they will give you a little more idea of our life on the road and all
of its many colors from the exotic to the every day. It also gives you
more glimpses into our Mozart’s every day life as a normal kid living
the traveling life and how it is not so different in many ways and full
of lots of variety. Some see the violin video and think that is her
whole life, but in truth it is just a small part and those videos take
only a few moments on traveling days to special spots.

Things picked up on the week end and the parties and music started. We
heard the famous fado songs from the locals! Little did we know that
this was the beginning of a long weekend holiday for the Portuguese,
their Independence day is June 10th. The people were very friendly and
Mozart was very happy as she had some friends to play with and
particularly liked two girls named Margarita and Inez. She talked to
them in Spanish and they talked to her in Portuguese and they managed
just fine. The beach was also very nice and we got to watch them
prepare a fishing boat on the shore and them be pulled out to the
Atlantic by a tractor.

It turned that we made the right choice. During our week of being
featured our "Where in Heaven is Mozart?" travel montage video went
from over 5000 views in three months to over 40,000 views in a few days
and many new subscribers. Then, less than a week later it was featured
on the front page and went viral, from that 40,000 views to over
700,000 in a few days. Again, we were unplugged and touring when that
began, so do not know exactly when it started or how long it was up.
Most of our videos made a massive jump in views and we suddenly had
almost 700 subscribers!

It was all a bit overwhelming and will take me some time to catch up
with all the mail, friend requests and such. I am not sure when I will
get to it, but I will try. Thank you and welcome to all the new people
who found us through Youtube! I have no idea who was the person that
selected us to be featured or how that happened, but I thank them too.
We are still stunned to see them take off like this and will continue
to keep putting up more as we have time.