Whether domestic or abroad, these steps and sources give depth and resonance to a journey:
1. Publisher: ROUGHGUIDES (roughguides.com), includes illustrated book, additional photos and audio online, gives very unvarnished view of a place/people.
2. Publisher: LONELYPLANET (lonelyplanet.com), includes user feedback page online ("postcards from the field" for Q/A, www.lonelyplanet.com >THORNTREE)
3. Virtual visit: do a "satellite view" of main sites on your itinerary so you have a spatial lay of the land.
Google Earth requires massive bandwidth, so I suggest instead the lighter-weight version, http://indexmundi.com >All Population Centers (alpha sorted)
4. Photo visit: use the MAP feature of http://flickr.com to zoom in on your town or your destination(s). Then you can see pictures that others have tagged to those locations. In fact you may wish to upload some of your best and add the map tags, too. Another way to connect photos to a map is seen in my Korea example, http://tinyurl.com/3yjjbq
5. Novels help some people get immersed in a place. Example: Michener's Hawai'i covers a lot of ground.
6. A single page of hotlinks would make the process of browsing for images, information, events would be the easiest way for everyone (free hosts for sharing documents online that I have used include http://box.net and http://skydrive.live.com from MSN and google's own http://sites.google.com)
Things to gather there:
<> cultural keywords (hotlink to wikipedia entries)
<> local foods (hotlink to wikipedia entries)
<> proper nouns: the mini-story carried by placenames, famous person's names
<> music samplers from local artists/genres
<> local events calendar/lists
<> images for each point on the journey (flickr geo-tagged images)
<> links to travelguides
<> links to some of the group's own material they put online (facebook photos, etc)