Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I've been blogging in fits and starts recently. After posting to my blog nearly every day for years I've had a lot of skip days recently. I skipped 9 days in October, 4 in November, and so far in December— which is only half over— I've already skipped 5 days. When it rains, though, it pours. On days I have blogged I've often posted 2 or even 3 entries.

Seeing that my tempo of blogging has become irregular is a bit of a disappointment. Years ago I set a goal of posting every day. (That blog is from 2021. I know I set the goal a few years before that, 2017 or maybe earlier, though I can't find anywhere I wrote down the goal back then. But in searching for it I did find an interesting perspective from 10 year ago on Why I Write.) After going strong and meeting my goals for years I now feel I'm running out of steam. Or, more precisely, running out of fucks to give. 

My sporadic turn to blogging the past few months is attributable to obvious factors. For one, I've been traveling a lot less as Hawk is recovering from foot surgery. I've always focused my blog on the joys and frustrations of travel. With less to do there's less to write. And I haven't wanted to write too much else. ...Which leads into Two: I'm kind of depressed. With not a lot going on right now I've been feeling down. I care less about writing when I'm down.

But hey, maybe I will write about other stuff soon. Just in thinking how I'll frame this journal entry today I've already thought of several other topics I could write about soon. Plus, it's not like nothing's happening just because we're not traveling. I just have to find the motivation, and the focus, to write.

October 2025 was my slowest month for blogging in years. A few quick stats:

• I posted 34 journal entries in October


• At a rate of just over 1.0 per day it's the slowest month I've had in... checks spreadsheet... 4½ years.


• Yes, I keep a spreadsheet. 🤣


• While I averaged one journal per day (actually 1.09/day) I didn't post one journal every day. In fact I missed nine days in October.


• I thought that would be my biggest number of missed days in, like, 10 years, but it turns out it's also just 4½ years. Basically, April 2021 was an unusually slow month for me. (I figured that not by looking at a spreadsheet but by eyeballing my monthly blogging by year.)

Okay, those are the stats. But the real question is "why". Why did I experience such a slowdown in my writing in October— especially compared to the relatively high 70 journal entries I wrote just two months earlier in August? Metrics don't answer meaningful question such as that though they at least tell a person where/when to ask.

The answer in this case is simple. I just didn't want to. Oh, I had more things I could've written about. There were things that happened in October I could have written about. There were things in my backlog from months earlier I could have written about. But so much of the time I just didn't care.

Earlier this year I wrote about the power of the phrase DFC— as in, I Don't Fucking Care. Used positively, it's liberating. It's a way to Marie Kondo through your life, filtering out what's not worth your time or frustration.

The downside of DFC, or Kondo-ing, is that when you're disaffected or depressed, everything can start to fail the question, "Does this bring me joy?" And that's what happened to me in October. A combination of factors, from me feeling physically listless, to the changing season signalling an end to our summery outdoors activity, to Hawk's surgery and recovery basically grounding both of us for weeks, have aligned to leave me feeling like I just don't care about doing any of the few options left.

It was a slow weekend after Hawk had her foot surgery on Friday. She napped a bit on Friday afternoon— and so did I. But while her sleepiness was unexpected, mine was... I don't know what.

Frittering and snoozing on Friday set a tone for the rest of the weekend. For Hawk, again, that's expected. She's getting over the physical stress of surgery and pain of incision. And she's hobbling around with a half-cast on one of her legs. Just getting up to go to the bathroom takes planning and determination. Me? I have no such excuses. I spent the weekend mostly sitting around like a bump on a log, and that's all on me. I wish I'd at least gone out to soak in the hot tub. But each time I considered it I decided I'd rather just sit inside like a bump on a log.

I'm disappointed that I couldn't even muster the will to write to my blog this weekend. Yeah, there was little new to write about; that's always a disincentive against blogging. But I have a backlog. I have things I've been meaning to write about from the previous weekend, the week before that, and the weekend even before that. Oh, and other stuff still in the backlog from earlier in the year and even last year. Now I'm wondering, will I ever get to these things? I don't know.

August was a pretty good month for blogging. I wrote 70 journal entries, my most since December 2024 (when I also wrote 70). At 2.26 blogs per day it's a big uptick from my pace in July and June, when it felt like a struggle just to hit 1.5/day.

What was different in August? The obvious answer is travel. This blog has always been primarily about my adventures and observations while traveling, and in August I had a whopping 5 trips.

Part, too, of publishing 70 journal entries in the month was planning them out. For most of the month I hit a stride of 2/day. I did that often with a conscious 1+1 combination: 1 post about a trip I'd taken recently, 1 about something else that was happening.

Late in the month I upped my pace as my trip in Canada brought more things to write about. I wrote 3-4 a day for several days. And I'm still about 5 days behind! But writing that much while still doing things took even more planning. I drafted posts ahead of time to get some of the easier and/or repetitive work out of the way when I had idle time, then filled in photos, video, and colorful details when I was ready with them.

September is shaping up to be another busy blogging month, too. For starters I've still got a backlog of about 10 Canada trip posts I'm working through. Then I've got 4 more trips planned for September!

I lost my tempo in July. My blogging tempo, that is. For the month I met my mid-level goal of 1.5 blogs/day, scraping in with a 1.55 average, but my pace across the month was not even. I missed my baseline goal of blogging every day.

I churned out journal entries at a rate of 2/day for the first half of the month. My writing was powered by enjoyable activities on a several days long road trip to the Oregon Cascades. But around mid month I lost steam. Even with a few blogs from Oregon still in my backlog I just... couldn't even. I had not one but three missed days in July. Three days when I didn't post to my blog. Before July I only missed two days across a whole year.

Why so many misses last month? I'm not sure. As I noted at the time, partly it was running short on energy, partly it was running short on care. ("Short on care" is the polite form of the expression, "Short on f---s to give". 😨)

It certainly wasn't lack of things to write about. I began the month with a healthy backlog of things to finishing writing about. During July I not only didn't get to anything on that backlog, I grew the backlog. I still haven't finished blogging about our trip to the Oregon Cascades at the start of the month, and I'm at least 4 blogs behind on last weekend's North Coast roadtrip. Why don't I enjoy writing about doing enjoyable things? 😣

Oregon Cascades Travelog #24
Back home - Sun, 6 Jul 2025, 6pm

We're back home from our trip to the Oregon Cascades and high desert. We got back home a bit after 5pm today, was a bit over 6 days after we left home Monday afternoon. The trip today was all driving, no adventuring, as we decided this morning we just wanted to get home. Today's drive was 334 miles, bringing the total distance for the trip to 1,762 miles. That's a lot to cover in 6 days— nearly 300 miles per day— especially with all the hiking we did in addition to the driving.

We're already unpacked from the trip. We make a point nowadays of unloading everything from the car and putting it away as soon as we get home. Years ago we'd sometimes play the "Ugh, we're so tired" card and leave things in the car, intending to unpack the next day. The thing is, there's usually no more convenient time to do it. The next day after a trip is usually a work day, which means there are plenty more reasons to put off unpacking. I think the record was stuff got left in the car for a week one time. 🤣

Speaking of tomorrow being a work day, it is. For me, at least. That was a big part of why I favored coming straight home today. At 6pm now it's not exactly "early", but I've got things unpacked, I'm stretching out to relax, and I can take it easy the rest of this evening. All this will make it somewhat easier to start a full work week tomorrow morning.
Edit to add: One thing that's not done from this trip is the blogging. I figure I've got about 10 blogs stuck in the backlog. We'll see if I can clear them out this week.

Italy Travelog #16
36,000' over the Tyrrhenian Sea - Tuesday, 27 May 2025, 10am

This morning we woke up early, 5:30am, to eat breakfast in our room, check out of our hotel in Rome, and taxi to the airport. We were out the door and in a taxi before 6:30, at the airport by 7:15. We're headed to Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia.

In case you're wondering, "Wait, you only toured Rome for one day?" the answer is No, we had two days there. At this point I've skipped over our Monday tours, leaving them in my blog backlog for now, to avoid getting too far behind. I'll come back around the to the backlog later. For now suffice it to say that Monday was busy. We toured the Vatican for several hours then took the metro back into Rome's city center to visit several sites such as Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon. It'll probably take me 3 days to catch up on blogging about all of that. And boy, are our feet tired from all the walking!

With this flight to Cagliari we're shifting gears on our trip. Our quick visit to Rome was the "us" part of the trip. Cagliari is the "club" part of the trip. We'll be with work colleagues, the top performers globally from my sales team, for the next few days.

It's been a busy week at work. Well, it was a busy 4 days at work this week. Monday through Wednesday I was slammed, my calendar packed solid with meeting. By Wednesday I was feeling frazzled and let my boss know I needed his help lightening things up. By Thursday 3pm I decided, "That's enough for now" and started slacking... which I did through much of today, Friday. That's why I say it was a busy four days this week. It would've been all 5 if I'd let it.

One place my busyness is reflected is in my slow blogging pace. The past several days I've posted only once a day. Even just maintaining my minimal, one-a-day pace required carving out time. And look what I haven't gotten to in that time: my hiking trip at Pinnacles National Park last weekend. I just haven't had the energy to finish up the photos and videos I'd like to share from it.

Oh, and Pinnacles isn't even the only enjoyable experience I haven't had the time or energy to write about. I've still got a few blogs in my backlog from our Georgia trip earlier this month. I don't even remember what else is in the backlog— most of it's a mental to-do list— except one thing I do remember is New Zealand. Yes, I still have at least a few blogs in my backlog from our trip to New Zealand... which is now 12½ months ago! 😳😖😓

Today' the fifth anniversary of the Coronavirus pandemic. Five years ago today, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Coronavirus a global pandemic. As I wrote in my blog that day, classifying it a pandemic was debatable and political. But I meant those terms positively. It was debatable because the definition of what's a pandemic involves subjective terms; and political because determining it was a pandemic would open up more political solutions. Governments that might not act in the face of a regional health concern, something happening "over there" and "to some people", could be prodded to act against what international health experts deemed a global problem potentially affecting everyone.

A common question I've seen posed in a lot of writing about this 5th anniversary is, "What's changed and what hasn't since then?" To answer that question it's important to be able to go back to that point in time and understand what was happening then. I fortunately have my own record of it: my blog. Take a look at my blog's table of contents page from March 2020 to see the things I was writing about in real time then.

One thing I was struck by in revisiting my contemporaneous writing was how Covid denialism was there pretty much from the beginning. Denials started started with China, of course. China's dictatorship covered up the seriousness of the problem to protect their reputation and keep their own populace in line. But very quickly the US political right, led by President Trump, started pounding Covid as a hoax ginned up by domestic political opponents to make him look bad in a reelection year and gain dictatorial control over the US. Trump had already established a daily cadence of calling it a hoax even before the WHO deemed it a global pandemic. And now, 5 years later, President Trump elected for a nonconsecutive second term has pulled the US out of the WHO.

It's sad to be reminded of just how quickly the situation with Coronavirus turned from political in the good sense— able to spur governments into action— into political in the bad sense, falling prey to partisan differences and demagoguery. It's still with us today. Covid denialism has become a tenet of the political right. And it's actually spread. Denialism has become a political way of life. The MAGA movement churns out "alternative facts" on pretty much every issue of the day. Undocumented immigrants are causing a crime wave, rooting out fraud in government spending has saved billions of dollars in just a few weeks, vaccines are worse than the diseases they supposedly prevent, tariffs lower prices, and the stock market isn't crashing because of the chaos coming from the White House. Don't believe your lying eyes when they tell you otherwise.

Non-Vegas Vegas Weekend Travelog #12
Back at the hotel - Sun, 16 Feb 2025, 8pm

Tonight is a lot like last night. We finished up fantastic hiking by 4pm, went for an early dinner at a Golden Corral buffet restaurant, and retired early to our room in a low-rise hotel very far off the Strip. Yes, today we ate at Golden Corral again. But it was a different Golden Corral restaurant. 😂 Hawk didn't like the one last night because they didn't have her favorite dinner dish— or her favorite dessert. The one we visited tonight had both. It also had more of a carnival atmosphere inside. (That's a bad thing, BTW. But we mostly ignored it.)

Also like last night I'm pushing this blog forward while letting several journals full of photos and videos from the hike(s) that need processing wait. At this point one— one— from yesterday is ready to publish. Another 5 are in the backlog behind this one. I'll work the backlog after we get back from our trip Monday night.

The one thing not like yesterday is where we went. I already posted in this morning's blog that we went to Valley of Fire State Park. There we hiked to the Fire Wave, probably the most famous spot in the park; continued the trail around in a loop through the Seven Wonders trail; and then hiked the White Domes loop.

We were spent after that and also red-rocked out. We skipped even drive-to spots elsewhere in the park, instead opting for a scenic drive home through the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. It was over an hour of easy, country-highway type driving, through a combination of wide-open Mojave Desert vistas (basin-and-range geography, not flat desert) and occasional canyons and red rocks outcroppings.

Now we're back at the hotel, resting and unwinding from a busy day. And we've still got tomorrow's activities to plan. Our flight home isn't until 7:30pm, so we can plan a full day!