I'd Rather Be ...

I'd rather be traveling. Most of my life dreams involved traveling in some form or another. Some of them Marilyn and I discussed, even though they never got much beyond the dream stage.

Before kids, we discussed loading up an RV with computing equipment and traveling around to some of the smaller U.S. towns providing freelance computer and programming services in person. Then we discussed traveling around after an empty nest on a big cruising motorcycle with a trailer.

Now with the Internet so pandemic and free wifi almost everywhere, I am once again thinking of traveling as a way of life. Indeed, if it is to be a way of life, it requires some income. Now Google has a mechanism, AdSense, to pass around a very small portion of its money machine. Theoretically allowing Google to place targeted ads on a blog, which is also one of the reasons they host blogspot, and having a sufficient number of readers such that some of those ads are clicked on will create some form of payment to the blog author. I plan on setting up AdSense just to get the mechanism down, and then getting creative on my blogging.

I'm having a lot of fun thinking of creative ways to combine traveling and blogging, some of which may involve my own website, which would have an additional benefit of involving an old love of mine, programming.

My idea: blog about various motorcycle tours, some exclusively from my own interest and research and others that are the result of either suggestions or surveys, hence the separate website, although suggestions could also come through comments on the blogs.

A one person brainstorm, really a tempest in a teapot, has generated the following:

A "Living Memory Tour," where I travel to all the places I remember living and document my memories of living there and how they've changed, with at least current pictures. Now, I recognize that this has limited commercial appeal, read that likely low reader interest, but it interests me and is both an excuse to ride my motorcycle and to write. I suppose I could include some additional places I've thought about living, or where Marilyn and I actually looked at houses, but that doesn't sound too commercial either.

Another tour might be the "Places I've Always Wanted to See Tour" or any combination of "Whizzing Around:" North America, the U.S., any State or Region, or even some foreign countries. The standing joke was that Marilyn always wanted to stop and go to the bathroom, preferably in some car campground, which she could mentally add, or not, to her "places she wanted to camp" list. She never wrote them down so I could never have a camping tour of these places but one "whizzing" tour could have a campground focus and another could have some other focus.

Perhaps the Whizzing theme or some other label could apply to some of the possible survey driven tours. I've eaten at several restaurants that posted certificates about their being the "best" in some category. Generally these are the result of a survey filled out by just a few readers of a really local paper. One tour could be based a compilation of those surveys or on blog reader input, perhaps through this website I still don't have. I still need to develop a cute rating to compare the various "bests."

"Biggest Oldest Tree Tour:" A tour of the Bristle Cone Pine, a couple old growth Redwood forests I want to visit, and old and large trees around the country of various species. Some of these are landmarks of historical or literary significance. While a tour of the Major League baseball parks has been done, my thought is to do a "Major Minor [league] Baseball Tour.

Even better, I can visit my children and siblings during the winter and not even need a separate place to live. (Ha, ha.)