Jim and April's Roadtrips

The last thing I remember, I was checking email. I opened my Writer’s Market newsletter. They had a link to regional magazines and I went to the site to check some of them out. I was pleased with the list and started a new section in my One Note to hold the information of the most interesting ones.

Somehow, something, led me from there to the Roadtrips we have planned for the summer and fall. Somehow I began looking at our September trip. I think I was checking dates. Something to do with a writing workshop in September. I went to the Combat Camera site and got lost in the forests of Vacationland.

I became engrossed with things to do in Charleston. I did resist the impulse to actually buy Charleston city bus passes, but I’ve got a new folder in my bookmarks with the page for doing it and links to likely hotels along the proposed route from there to Washington and back home. Plus several points of interest in Charleston. I made a folder on my desktop as well, with bus schedules and a trolley route map. I do love planning Roadtrips.

As I moved on to Mapquest and laying out the route, they’ve added some cool new features to their website. I had to set up a new profile, then I got sidetracked again when I realized the map I had saved there for the July trip to Montana wasn’t right. I deleted the whole thing and re-entered it. Then went to our Roadtrip website to embed the new one and hit a computer glitch.

The map is there on Mapquest in all its glory. They give me the code to put on the page, just a simple copy paste. I did it exactly like always, and got a blank page. In the editor, it shows the code, but the page doesn’t display the map. I wrestled with it for more than an hour and finally gave up when I looked at the clock and realized I’d thrown away a whole day without accomplishing anything on my goals list.

Now, I must get back to work because tomorrow will not be my usual Saturday catch up day. Tomorrow’s event was supposed to be my post for today.  I guess it will be next week instead.  We have plans for a photo club outing. We’re off to the the civil war “Battle of Sacramento” re-enactment. Lots of photo ops and a mini-roadtrip. Yay!  See some examples from our 2007 expedition below.  Re-enactors  love having their photo taken.  Come join us. Two days of fun, this Saturday and Sunday.

“Road Trip, Road Trip,” is the cry of the excited explorer when an interesting or challenging destination comes up in the conversation.  But exactly what is required to make a “Roadtrip” as opposed to a shopping trip or family outing?  I’m sure there are as many definitions as there are people who travel.

But, for the purposes of this website, we’re going to use my interpretation.  A Roadtrip is any journey of any length to anywhere that involves taking photos or making side trips.  If we go to Fort Campbell for groceries, like today, and stop to take pictures on the way back, it becomes a Roadtrip.  If we leave town, at all, and there are more than 2 people in the car.  It qualifies unless we are simply going to shop and coming straight home.  A Roadtrip, essentially, is going someplace for fun that’s not part of your regular routine.

Today, we went to Fort Campbell for groceries.  We do this once a month.  In the beginning, it was a Roadtrip because it was an experimental shopping trip that we’d never tried before.  Now it is a routine unless we do something else adventurous along the way, like take a different route, stop somewhere we don’t usually go, or wander along looking for photo ops.  After we finished shopping this afternoon, we were talking about this week’s topic for our photo club’s yearly challenge.  The assignment is to take a photo expressing symmetry.  Jim said, “How about the crosses in the Veteran’s cemetery at Hopkinsville?” That’s all it took.  We’d never been there, just driven past, and it was a photo op.  Instant Roadtrip!

Now I know that some of you will disagree with me on this. So, what do you think it takes to turn a long drive into a Roadtrip?  Half the fun of having a blog is the conversations.  Comment below, let’s get something going.

Recently, Jim and I went to Nashville.  He had an appointment with the doctors at the VA clinic to check on a blood clot in the leg he injured when he was run over by an airplane (That’s his story to tell. Maybe on his blog.)  Anyhow, everything is fine there and the appointment took less time than we expected, so we decided to cruise downtown Nashville for a while.

JIm knew there was a camera shop called Dury’s there but, not exactly where to find it.  A little iPhone searching got us the address and my Google GPS app took us right there.  Technology is so much easier than walking through the yellow pages.  We spent an hour browsing and dreaming but didn’t  find anything we couldn’t survive without.

However, I’ve added some things to my Christmas list.  When we went to Chicago with the photo club a couple of years ago, we also hit the camera shop.  Actually, we usually hit a camera shop at any big city we visit.  My complaint has always been, “There are almost no camera bags that are designed for women.” …

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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.