An Eighth Year Gone By

Today is the eighth anniversary of this site. First of all, I want to thank all of you folks who have been going along with me on my journeys. I know that you have a lot of other things that draw your attention from both an entertainment and a living perspective so I’m honored that you can spare a few minutes of your time out of any day to care about what I’m doing over here. Secondly, I know that there are more popular ways for people to absorb information (specifically through short form video and social media in general) so that fact that you spend the time to let a writer write is doubly humbling. Having come back to you this year with 87 new counties (some of which I haven’t even written about yet!), this has been neither my most nor least productive year but my resolve has not wavered. I still have another 2,744 counties (or county equivalents) to visit and, while I feel I’m not getting to as many as I would like, the goal is to continue ever forward!

I managed to get in two good trips in the last year. The first one was to Atlanta and through some of the Deep South. As you can imagine, I slowed my roll a bit on that trip. While some of my immediate fears about the region were more than likely unfounded, I wasn’t going to risk a worst case scenario outcome so there was no night caching while I was out there. It also brought how much I have been using night caching on the road to my attention. For years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to use what I once considered dead hours to their best effect. Now that I’ve absorbed those practices, not using them had some repercussions on what I could accomplish. Add in short days (I went in late fall because who wants to be driving the South in the summer?), and I didn’t get very much done. If I maintain those rules, I suspect that the South is going to take a very long time to finish. I may have to find someone (or ones) to travel with if I want to try to get those states done in some semblance of a timely manner. Or try going through there in summer. On the other hand, I did make a trip to Manitoba and it was resplendent. While I realize there was a little bit of slowdown because of both distance (the hardest thing about road tripping out of Texas is getting out of Texas) and aging (I’m not quite the same man I was when I started all this), I still managed 48 counties in four days thanks to the extremely long summer days of the north. I even got a little mini-trip a few weeks later as an adjunct to something else, but I haven’t gotten to that yet in the narrative. I’m hoping to do a bit more over the next year now that certain issues have resolved themselves, but we shall see. There’s even a chance that I may take a non-county related trip! All I can promise you is, as previously mentioned, ever forward.

As always, I can be found at Patreon, Bluesky, and the social media outlet formerly known as Twitter, though I would really like people to hold more Events while I’m out on the road. I totally want to randomly drop in on a local Event on a Thursday from the most unlikely place that folks can imagine!

Raise your glasses, my friends! Year Eight ends! Here’s to Year Nine!