There are three rules of travel blogging.
Rule #1: You must travel.
Rule #2: You must write about your travels.
Rule #3: Rule #1 takes precedence over rule #2.
So it is with our travel blogging lately. Two months plus in travel time have passed since our last report, three weeks or so in blogging time, the difference being the lag between when we visit a place and then write about it. As that lag gets out of hand when rule #1 trumps rule #2, we have a lot of catching up to do.
Since that blog from Oregon, we moved on to the Seattle area, where we couch-surfed with old friends for a couple of weeks. Then we returned to Oregon for a few weeks where we were dazzled by the Oregon coast and sampled the wines of the Willamette Valley before submitting ourselves to a 4-day, 2,600-mile drive across these United States of America. Along the way, we celebrated Lori’s “Big 5-0” and visited with family in Peoria, Illinois.
Home in Atlanta we enjoyed 4 days of staying put: dinners and catching up with family and friends, changing out our summer travel wardrobe with a fall/winter one (and downsizing for air travel), and glorying in the newfound fact that we will one day soon be grandparents.
Yes, that’s right, our son and his wife are expecting in June.
We’ve been saying for a while now that we wanted to get in some serious travels before the grandchildren started coming along. You might assume, then, that this means an end to our travels. You’d be wrong, of course, but naturally it does mean changes to our travels. We might adjust our style of travel so that we’re more frequently swinging through home, but there’s a whole lot more world to explore, and now we will have one more in our list of progeny to share our passion for travel with.
We tearfully moved on from Atlanta according to our plans, though eager to keep on exploring. We spent a weekend visiting with our daughter’s future in-laws in Ohio before we put our daughter and her beau on a plane home and we continued on. As I write this, we are on a train from Bristol, England to Derby, England to visit with friends for the weekend.
So what’s the way-behind travel blogger to do? We have a tantalizing number of destinations and topics to write about including Mount Rainier, whale watching in the Puget Sound, a chocolate factory tour, the indescribably beautiful Oregon coast, the Spruce Goose, grape harvest and stomping in Oregon, and the very impressive Columbus Zoo—not to mention a few how-to’s and various observations on how to achieve long-term travel and what we’ve been up to the 10 days we’ve been in England so far (a swing dance championship, Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, and three more of England’s cathedrals). Either we drop a few topics, or we double up on our schedule.
Starting this coming week, I’m going to go with the latter, i.e. work hard to catch up on our blogging rather than forego writing about where we’ve been. Our 3-blog-a-week schedule will be sacrificed for a while; we hope you don’t mind. Hence our blogs will come out randomly for a while—as we get to them—but hopefully more than 3 a week. At least that’s the plan. The reason is not that we’re gluttons for blogging punishment but found in the principle reason that we blog. Which, you might find surprising, is to maintain a fine point on our (ok, Chuck’s mainly) writing skills. If you haven’t gathered it before, he fancies himself a writer.
Anyway, we’re off to our next destination and, soon enough, our next era in life as nomadic, wine-loving, ballroom-dancing, empty-nest grandparents.
