Jim and April's Roadtrips

Lately, I’ve been looking at SEO plugins to add to our blogging sites as part of a platform building exercise being run by Robert Brewer over at My Name Is Not Bob.  For that same challenge, I installed a share plugin on all our blog sites a couple of weeks ago.

Today, we discovered that the share plugin was putting banner type ads at the top of the page whenever anyone followed the links from Facebook.  There was nothing obvious in the plugin setup instructions to indicate they intended to do this and it didn’t start occurring right away.  Since I’ve been very busy lately and was away from the computer most of this past weekend, I’m not sure when it started and I apologize to anyone who found this activity annoying.

Aside from the fact that I don’t appreciate someone installing ad-ware without telling me upfront that it is going to happen, I was concerned by the fact that I had no personal control over the content or positioning of the ads and wasn’t offered any benefit other than the use of the plugin.  I would have been willing to pay a reasonable fee to get the plugin ad free, but I couldn’t find anywhere to do that either.

So, I am now also looking at sharing plugins in addition to SEO plugins.   I’ll be testing them out for a couple of weeks to see which ones work best for our purposes.  I plan to install a different one on each blog and let them run for a couple of weeks to see what they do since I’ve been stung once.  This may result in frequent changes to the look of the posts for a while.  Bear with us.  When I find something that is simple for us to use while being convenient for our readers, I will promote it on all the sites.

If you are a WordPress user and have a recommendation, mention it in the comments below.  All advice is appreciated.

Photo time for the photo weekends at Pennyrile Park is split into two days.  For most people, that is about five hours of afternoon and evening light on Friday and the same of morning light on Saturday, around 10 to 12 hours total, unless you have a penchant for night photography which could potentially extend your time to a full 24 hours.  Personally, I am not partial to wandering the lake trails in the dark.

Since one of the categories for my Intermediate class this session is photos of the Lodge, I did try some night shots around the grounds, but I felt the lighted windows were too blown out, so I wound up not using them.  That’s not unusual.  We are allowed to turn in only one picture for each of four categories.  I had a total of 274 images on my card when we stopped shooting to come in and eat lunch today.  Picking four out of all that is time consuming, so we didn’t go back out afterwards. …

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I frequently debate with myself what qualifies as a Roadtrip.  How far do you have to go?  Is there a required time limit?  Can I call it a roadtrip if we don’t leave the county?  Is it a roadtrip if you are only gone a few hours? Mostly, I think it has to be one or the other.  Before I call it a Roadtrip, we need to travel 100 miles or stay overnight.

So, trips to Ft. Campbell for groceries don’t really count, not far or long enough.  This weekend, we are  only 30 minutes from home, but we will be spending two nights, so I define it as a Roadtrip.  We are at Pennyrile State Park in Dawson Springs.  We usually come here twice a year for their Photography Weekends.  This year, there are seven of our West Kentucky Photography Club members roaming the forest in search of photos for each category.  One of the great things about this event is the fact that we have the opportunity to spend time with friends from other areas of the state.

Check in time was 2pm this afternoon.  We were in the woods by 2:30.  I’ve shot 100 photos so far.  That’s the great thing about digital cameras.  I can shoot as many exposures as I want and have a much better chance of getting exactly the shot I wanted.  Today, the only picture I’ve processed is the one for our Yearlong Challenge.  Since the laptop doesn’t have a working version of Photoshop at the moment, I’m waiting til tomorrow to work on the contest photos.  We’ll both post those tomorrow evening after spending the morning hours looking for light and water.  The lake levels are extremely low since they drained it low enough to work on the beach area and there hasn’t been enough rain this spring to refill it.  Even the creeks are nearly dry as you can see from my Seated theme picture.

Plans for our summer trips are moving along.  This past week I made hotel reservations for the Montana trip in July.  Today, while on a mini-roadtrip to Fort Campbell for groceries, Jim consulted with Aunt Jean to firm up times and days for the Pearson Family Reunion.  He and I will be going to Louisville on Friday, June 1st to get things set up.  Others will join us on Saturday or Sunday, as their schedules permit, with the actual lunch and meeting on Sunday, June 2nd at noon.

We’ll be staying at the La Quinta Inn on the Southeast side of the city.  La Quinta Inns are our brand of choice.  They are reasonably priced with comfortable rooms and plenty of amenities.  I was first introduced to the LQ on a winter road trip.  I had been to Charlotte, NC to visit my daughter, Jamie, and her family.  It was February, but the winter had been mild up to that point.  I didn’t see any snow going through the mountains on the way there and the roads were still clear on the way home until I left Knoxville in the early afternoon.

That’s when it started to snow.  Big fluffy flakes of white swirling across the road like feathers.  The ground was covered quickly and it still continued to fall.  By the time I had gone 25 miles, traffic was slowed down to under 10 miles an hour.  It got worse after that.  All the lanes were full and the it rapidly became a matter of roll forward a minute or two, sit still for 5 or 10 minutes, roll forward again, and so on.  People were leaving their cars where they sat to walk their dogs along the shoulder of the highway, then coming back when the roll forward phase started. …

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Keeping a Road Trip blog going requires some flexibility.  If you want to post only about actual trips while you are on the road, one of two things will happen.  Either you won’t be posting very often and the blog will stagnate, eventually starting to stink, or you will need to go somewhere on a frequent basis, which can be expensive.  So, we’ve kind of split the difference.  There have been times when we didn’t post for a while, more because we were busy than by plan.  But we also post about other things and past trips, just to keep the activity going.

One of the reasons for our trip to Ohio a couple of weeks ago, was to plan another trip later this year.  The first weekend in June, we will be hosting a Pearson family reunion near Louisville.  I say “a” because I know there are many Pearson families out there who are not directly related to us.  In fact, there are probably a lot of Pearsons out there who are related by six degrees or so and don’t know it, but that’s a genealogy trip which we may take later on.  For now we are focusing on the children and grandchildren of my father’s siblings and our only remaining aunt.

This group normally meets in Ohio near where my grandparents lived.  This is only the second time it’s been held in Kentucky.  This is reasonable because there are many more relatives there than here.  However, everyone who came to Kentucky Lake when we hosted previously had a great time and we are hoping for a successful repeat.  This time, we are planning the Louisville area because it is about half-way between the Ohio groups and us. …

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