At first, there was only an idea. It would be fun to try and visit all of the National Parks in the United States. Back in 1982, I had ordered a small booklet from the guv’mint printing office listing all of the National Park units (at that time, 350 or so). I was mostly interested in the full-fledged “National Parks”, but was amazed at all of the other designations: National Historic Site, National Battlefield, National Monument, and so forth. I was intrigued.
In 2006, the family took a three-week trip (the longest “vacation” I ever took) visiting 10 NPS units throughout the west. Most were National Parks, but a few other types were thrown in. Now the idea morphed into “visit them all!”. Future trips meant more visits to parks, but only a few at a time. Work was the obstacle to seeing more! Thus, the idea became a retirement quest – visit every unit, including those that I had already visited at some point in life (around 60 sites).
With a goal now firm, I realized that I would like to document my journies with more than just hundreds of photos dumped onto a hard drive, seldom seen again. I had a National Park Passport (explained in a later post), but it could only hold a limited number of stamps and no details. I hit upon the idea of creating my own booklets for my park stamps. I’d create a page for each park unit, where I could add comments and photos about the trip, along with any passport stamps. It would be a printed record of my trips.
When I started telling other people about my post-retirement plans, some asked that I let them know how it goes. Now, I realize some people may say that in the same way people say “How are you?”, without really caring how you are. But I thought there may be some family and friends who would be interested in seeing where I go, and being a former (well, “retired” really) computer geek, I decided to put together a website.
It had been over eleven years since I created a website, especially one incorporating PHP and MySQL. Much has changed in web design in that decade and much has departed my memory in the same period. Creating the website has been an enjoyable challenge, with the first steps just being to design it on paper. The MySQL database has been built and currently, I am dummying sample pages on which to base the PHP. It will eventually get there.
The website was becoming a list of trips, dates, sites, photos, and short commentary about each site. I wanted something more – where I could elaborate on each visit, throw in some opinions, and comment about some topics in general, without being tied to a specific site. Thus, the idea of a blog was born.
I plan to write an entry for every site I visit, but will also write background entries (such as this one) and other thoughts along the way. I don’t think I will be short of words, as you can already see that I took six paragraphs to answer the simple “Why this blog?” questions posed at the start.
The blog software I’m using does allow for comments, so please feel free to add your thoughts to any post.
DISCLAIMER: In the name of full disclosure, this initial blog entry, along with the ones titled “The Origins” and “Initial Research”, were not written in August as the dates may indicate. My initial trip came less than three weeks after my retirement date, and other events prevented me from getting anything set up in that time. After that trip, I started getting pieces of a website together, but as mentioned, after 11 years, there were a lot of errors and retries just installing the software. My second trip was in November, followed by a Christmas trip to Iowa. I finally got the blog software working the way I wanted (mostly) though I dislike the look and will be changing it when I figure all of that code out.
For many of my stops on my first two trips, I did write a blog entry at the time – but just into a Notepad file. These are being transferred now to the blog and backdated to look as though I really did write and post them on the visit date. This entry itself was written in early February and backdated to appear as the first entry.
I apologize for the date falsification but felt that a year or two or three down the road, I’d rather have a blog where entries match actual visit dates and everything flows chronologically as though I had everything ready to go on day one.
