Tonight, I will depart from Detroit to Paris, France before arriving in Tours, my home for the next eight weeks. While in Tours, I will be staying with a host family and taking courses along with other MSU and international students at the Institut de Touraine. Experiencing French language and culture firsthand is bound to be a very fun and educational experience for me. In addition to my studies, we will also be embarking on several excursions, including day trips to Paris and Mont Saint-Michel and watching the Tour de France cycle through Tours during its 100th anniversary. While I can’t bring everyone along with me physically, I can do my best to document my travels online, so I’ll be using social media to share updates during the summer semester.

On y va! — let’s go!

Pictures

If you are an Instagram user, follow KurtTrowbridge for a steady feed of pictures while on the go. Once I receive my local phone in Tours, I should be able to share directly to Instagram when taking pictures on the phone; I will also be uploading pictures from my digital camera to Instagram using Dropbox as an intermediary program. Even if you aren’t on Instagram, you can easily see all of my photos from the trip: each of my uploaded pictures with the hashtag #msutours13 will appear in an auto-updating feed at the top of my France category page, thanks to a WordPress plugin called Instapress. More pictures will be uploaded to my Facebook page; feel free to follow or befriend me there as well.

Locations

While most people have moved on from Foursquare at this point, I still check in fairly regularly. Follow me to see where I’m going throughout France and maybe get a tip or two if you’re ever in the area. I’m also looking into displaying a map on the site that will show checkins that I can reference in posts – feel free to send me recommendations if you have a WordPress plugin or program that would accomplish such a map.

Posts

For the most quick (and likely least interesting) updates, I will be posting on Facebook and Twitter. More in-depth posts will be posted here, including photos and links when relevant. While these posts will be automatically shared to Facebook and Twitter, you can also get notifications for updates through this RSS feed or by selecting the “Notify me of new posts by email” option when commenting on a post.