So, what should you expect to see on this blog, and why would you want to follow it?

My friends and family take some pretty amazing vacations and adventures. I love hearing about them afterwards, but it’s just not the same as feeling a vicarious part of what they’re doing while they’re gone—though I think about them a lot and imagine what kinds of trouble they’re getting into! When mom and dad are traveling, they post hundreds of pictures a week of the places they’re exploring and the things they’re doing. My favorite part of these posts is the accompanying descriptions—seeing a picture of mom sitting in a 16th century cell is interesting. Knowing that it’s the jail cell that her 12th grandfather, William Bradford sat in at 17 years of age, before knowing he was ever going to make it to the New World, and that she was moved to tears by the experience…that’s worth knowing.
So, one thing I hope to do with the blog is share the substance and meaning of our adventures while the adrenaline is still coursing through my veins.

Back in 1978, my family took a pretty amazing trip to England at Christmastime. My sister was a little older than I was, and she kept a diary and lots of ticket stubs and other artifacts. Years later we were able to relive the trip, and remember a lot of things we’d forgotten about it.

So another purpose of the blog is to help those of us who go on the trip to remember the details and what an awesome experience we had.

When I was putting this trip together, it was hard to explain to people what the experience would be like, since it’s unlike the kind of vacation that most people take. I put together a ‘brochure’ with pictures I pulled off of the web to let everyone know what the places look like and what kind of hotels we’re staying in. This helped them visualize what they were paying for. I hope we will make more trips like this in the future, and I’m going to want a tool to sell people on it from the start.

So the third purpose of the blog is to sell our friends who aren’t coming with us on getting it in gear and committing to the next one! And if you’ve stumbled on this blog by accident, or are a friend of a friend of a friend, we’d probably welcome your participation, too!

As far as the content goes, I think you’ll be pleased and surprised, assuming I’m able to get all the technology figured out before we go!

I’ll be bringing my Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS watch on the trip. This watch not only keeps track of mileage, but uploads the course on a Google map. So I’m hoping to post each day’s route--including wrong turns and backtracks!

One of our group, Brock, is a professional videographer (not entirely sure that’s the right description, but it’s accurate, anyway.) He’ll be skating / biking (he’s the ‘1/2’ I referred to earlier when I said 2 ½ people were biking the trip) carrying a professional video camera. I’m hoping he’ll be able to piece together a few short clips of our time together each night so I can post them and key them to where they happened on the course map. I’m also assuming that many people will have still cameras, and I’ll post the best of each day’s pictures as well.

And then of course I’ll tell you what we did. It will be one person’s perspective, so I’m sure a lot will be missed! But you’ll get the general feel for what we did each day, with my spin on what it meant to me, or what I saw other people connecting with. Whether it’s the exasperation of being on the wrong side of the river from our destination, the humor of someone falling into a creek, a moving experience with a local kid, or a menu translation that resulted in eating something we did NOT expect to be eating, I’ll try to make these posts interesting and meaningful for anyone reading them.

I hope we’ll have lots of people following us as we prepare, and waiting each day for the new post to find out what went wrong and what went right, and what it meant to us!

Steve