Grandchildren - staying in touch

We are very close to our granddaughter (just one) and need to stay in touch now that we are on the road fulltime. Besides planning to steal her during school vacations, we toyed with other ways to keep in contact. We planned to do Skype but it will kill our data plan and we need that for work. We may do it when we have enough excess data at the end of our billing cycles. We signed up for Club Penguin and enjoyed that while we were at the house (she loved having our penguin pop in and visit - she even put a coffee pot in her igloo for Papa). That was another data hog so it is for limited use also.

What we settled on is twofold:
-First: We read to her. We have Kindle PaperWhites and have downloaded books that she likes. We call her a half hour before sleep-time on nights she does not have late activities and read to her. If she is ready for bed ontime, she gets more reading time. If she dawdles, she either gets one short chapter or we chat a minute and then she has to go to sleep without the reading (sad for us all). This works since we have Verizon signal most of the time with unlimited minutes. We all love the chatting and reading.
- Second: We play "Where's Papa?". I purchased the 2014 Rand McNally Road Atlas and it lives in the pocket of the drivers seat with a yellow highlighter. I ordered an identical one online and had it shipped to her. Whenever we move, I email coordinates to her daddy who prints them out then takes them home to map it out with her using a yellow highlighter on her book. She keeps track of us and learns mapping and geography at the same time. At the end of the trip our books should match. An example:
28-Oct   Map point #8
      State: Tennessee
      Map Page: 74
      Map Grid: K-3
      Route Driven: US 40 west out of Asheville and up over the mountains. West on 411 to Sevierville, then South on 441 into Pigeon Forge
   We are camped along Little Pigeon Creek which babbles along happily beside us. A great blue heron likes to hang out right across the creek from us and groom himself. He squawks and calls as he flies in and out all day. It is just 7 am and I hear him out there already. Papa loves working at the picnic table and watching the water flow past.

This is working well for us so I thought it might be useful for others that keep in touch with grandkids. The mapping would work as easily for a dozen. You send out the books and just copy everyone on the email.

OUTSTANDING!  A tremendous example on many, many levels!  Thank you.

Holy batman,,, that's a lot of work haha,, but I like it... especially the map, that's a great ideal,,, hold old is your g-kid, ours is 3.5 so just getting to the real fun time,,, have you researched how young kids can fly unaccompanied yet?  I know when our daughter was young we would send to the g-parents at a fairly young age,,, were going to Alaska in 15, would love to take him with us and I think he will be old enough then, they live in Portland, so we could do a drive by and kidnap him hehe

sparky

Ours is now 7 with a mind of her own. She intends to spend school vacations on the road with us - we just have to convince mommy and daddy. I don't know how young they can fly alone but we figure one of us can fly out to get her or we bribe daddy with a nice vacation destination and get him to ferry her one way. We have a toad so we can play fetch if we are close enough.

A trip to Alaska would be awesome with the grandchild- I hope you pull it off. A good book to read and use is "The Nature Connection" by Clare Walker Leslie. We've only used it a bit but our granddaughter has already started keeping nature journals, planting trees from found seeds and using our nature ID books to identify plants and critters she finds. She's currently on a mission to see the rings of Saturn through a telescope. We have a hard time keeping up with her.

ENJOY your grandchild, they grow up way too fast.

thanks,,, due to the distance of separation little hard to do a pick up haha.... did a quick look at some of the airlines,  some of them actually allow 5 year olds WOW, varies though,,, on direct flights,,, you have to do the check-in where they get walked on the plane, ( this is what we always did with our daughter)  looks like to me depending upon the child 7.8.9 yrs old  would be a good time to start...so looks like were going to have to wait for a fly in for couple more years,,,I know when our daughter would fly alone, she would think it was the biggest deal ever haha,, I figure were still 2 years from a long trip with him anyway,,,
sparky