From Humble Beginnings...

 

"Are you talking about your upbringing on the west side of Sioux City?" you ask.  Thanks for asking, but no.  That was, indeed, humble; but I'm talking about the precursor to this blog.  Starting back in the early 90s, when it was very expensive to make a cell phone call (we carried one - a bag phone - for emergencies), if Joan and I were out traveling, we stayed in touch by standing in line at an RV park to use the pay phone.  To keep Stephanie and my Mother in the loop, we would occasionally send out what we called: a travel newsletter.

For the earliest of those newsletters, we didn't have a digital camera, so I would use "cut art" to sort-of illustrate what we were doing...

 

I tried to keep things humorous.  It evolved into "The Traveling Enquirer" where I may have tried to sensationalize what we were doing...

 

By 1996, we bought our first digital camera and were able to include actual photos into the newsletter.  There would always be a Christmas edition that went out to more family and friends.  Then came requests to be included in the weekly (or so) newsletters that went out.  Printer ink got more expensive while cell phone costs dropped.  By the turn of the century (that's 2000 not 1900), a PCMCIA card in the laptop meant we could send an electronic version of the newsletter.  I continued making the printed version, mostly for my Mom, Steph, and a copy for ourselves.

In 2008, off to Yellowstone for the first of our "fun summer jobs," I started this blog so Steph could see, daily (or so), what we were doing.  I continued with the printed newsletters... until 2012.  My dear ol' Mother passed away in 2011, so the printed newsletter was just for Steph and us.  The newsletters were still once-a-week (or so), where the blog was "same day" updates.  In 2012, I discontinued the printed newsletters in favor of this blog.

Over time, the blog developed a following.  It went from a few views a day to a hundred views a day to several thousand.  Probably had something to do with writing the book about our travels with Molly the cat and using Facebook to link the book and this blog.

Not long after that, I decided Facebook had gotten overly weird for my tastes, so I tightened my account down to just people I actually know (going from "public" to "friends").  I stopped linking the blog or even talking about it on any social media.  Most days, the number of visitors here is between 200 and 500.  I think most folks are just interested in what Molly, then Izzy, and now Rufus are up to.  ;-)

Yesterday, I started making digital copies of years worth of images.  Towards the end of that task today, I came across some of those very early newsletters.  Humble, indeed.

And this birthday edition for my Mother's 75 birthday (in 1996)...