2012-2024
Documenting thirteen years' worth of big road trips is a challenge at any time, but it's all the more so when you're trying to do it long after the fact. If by some chance you happened to visit this site before the 2021 revamp (and you had the appropriate direct links), you would have been able to see travelogs for 2012, 2013, and 2014 on some very simple webpages. These were thrown together while I was actually on the road using a laptop and motel room wifi, and were intended to cover highlights of each trip for people back home. I stopped doing these in 2015 due to the excessive time I was spending going through all the material and putting it together every few days while on the road - during my supposed vacation, I would rather do something else. But when home and not running around North America, collecting all my big road adventures together in detail on the site has been a long time coming.
Of course, this is a lot easier to do when a trip is fresh in your mind. My memory, though good, isn't infallible when it comes to the small details or interesting anecdotes from as long as a decade ago. So when it came time to put the new travelogs together, I drew on every available source I could find. For the earlier trips/travels, my old travelogs were among the first sources consulted. Quite often these had documented small details of a trip that had long since been forgotten, such as the weather during a particular drive or what had factored into my thought process for a particular decision on where to go next. These travelogs were often invaluable tools for the years 2012-2014. They also helped me identify the photos that best channeled the experiences of a trip as chosen during a time when the events were extremely fresh in my mind. Another important source of information was old Facebook posts. Although I quit Facebook for good in 2021, I downloaded all my data from my three old profiles before shutting things down. I was thus able to use the old posts (as well as conversation threads and comments made to the posts by others) to piece together elements of every trip from 2019 going back to 2010 and what influenced any decisions I made at the time. Importantly, these also helped with determining the times and locations a lot of the photos were taken, since prior to 2015 I didn't use a smartphone and thus had neither GPS coordinates nor timestamps embedded in the metadata for most anything before that time. Prior to my first smartphone, I had a slider phone which did timestamp photos, but which produced pictures of poor quality even by the standards of the time. The timestamps on photos taken with a Kodak Easyshare (used through 2014) were not always reliable, since I had long before stopped bothering to set and correct the date and time when changing the battery, and DSLR photo timestamps were often based on the incorrect time zone (adjusting my cameras' clocks for time changes is something I have always had trouble remembering to do). Beginning in 2015, I was able to use Google Maps in conjunction the recorded GPS coordinates on photos taken with my various smartphones to pinpoint where pictures were taken, and this was a huge help in reconstructing the exact routes taken for those years. Finally, I used e-mails sent to people back home and the responses that were received to further help fit everything together. Thusly, I have been able to recover enough detail to recap every road trip taken from 2010-2022. For the 2003 trip, I had 35mm film and that was it, with no timestamps, GPS coordinates, e-mails, or Facebook (or even Myspace) postings to work off of. So for that year, I have opted to just mention some highlights of the experience rather than attempt to day by day reconstruction of my activities. A lot of searching via mapping services based on hints seen in some 2003 photos did help me identify and document the original photo locations, but that's as far as I have chosen to take things.
Whether I'll go on many more of these big road trips is uncertain. The long hours spent behind the wheel, the wear and high mileage put onto multiple vehicles, and the diminishing returns as I run out of interesting and exciting destinations I want to visit weigh more and more heavily upon me with each successive year. What the future holds road trip wise is still up in the air and thus still remains to be seen. What I can say for sure is that I will definitely be much more timely in documenting any new adventures of mine moving forward.