Back in 2010, I started a book review blog on LiveJournal. I ended up moving to a “content farm” platform to post the book reviews, and left that old LiveJournal to sit until late 2014.
I guess I’ll have to go back even farther than I’d planned in this explanation. In 2010, my dad bought me that DVD set that had the entire run of National Geographic issues from 1888 to 2008 on it. I always tried to find the discipline to sit down and read them and also get caught up on the issues that have come out since then, but never quite could get around to it.
So, in January of 2015, I decided to use a sort of carrot-on-a-stick approach (since I’ll probably never finish this project) to motivate me. I decided to start reading National Geographic issues and posting about them on that old blog. Eventually that project turned into a travel blog, with National Geographic articles, reminiscences about my own travel (so far I’m still writing about travel from when I was ten and earlier, so the memories tend to be kind of vague at this point), and posts about travel destinations in both of the regions that I have called home — Northern Illinois and South Texas. That travel blog has inspired me to start this blog, which will be a travel blog (and also include National Geographic writeups) from the very start.
In the interest of getting everything onto one blog, I will eventually start moving those earlier posts over here. I haven’t decided if I will do it all at once, or if I will do it one post at a time. I also haven’t decided if I will repost them with their original posting dates or with the date and time that I reposted them here. It is likely at this point that I will repost then one at a time dated as of the dates that I post them here and say “originally written on . . .” at the top.
Also, my spell-checker doesn’t think that “repost” is a word.
In pursuit of this project (particularly to try to recapture as many of those early travel memories as possible), I asked my dad to see how many of our old vacation photo albums he could find and started scanning them in. This has evolved into a major photo scanning project. I ended up buying a new scanner because I was concerned that I might damage or burn out the scanner I bought for my son last Christmas. As I write this, I have scanned in over 1,600 images and I’m probably about 1/3 of the way done with all of the photos that we have been able to find so far. I know there are others to be found, two sets of pictures in particular. My mom made photo albums of two of our earliest trips to Florida that have yet to be found. Also, my now-ex-husband and I took two honeymoons (a long weekend right after the wedding and a (if I recall correctly) 9-day trip to Florida once we had some vacation time saved up). I have not yet been able to find the pictures we took on either of those trips. Hopefully, as I get more confident (and find more photo albums), I will start to put my and my family’s pictures of destinations in my posts.