Twelve years, huh?

I started ignoring  this thing after migrating over to 'social media'. The media quit being social, and after a while, the inertia there became less "keep using it" and more "keep forgetting it exists, too." I wanted a place to keep track of what had been going on in my life, though. 

Right. I have a blog. Had a blog? Nope. Turns out I can still log in. I have a blog. How early-2000s. 

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So... what am I trying to keep track of? Travel. (Oh, right. The conceit of this blog calls those 'expeditions'. What was I thinking?)  There is one thing that has not changed in twelve years: I am long-winded. So, some setup of how I got here. 

Back in the summer of '24, my job switched to supporting a different customer. This shop has a 4x10 schedule, and I figured that's a lot of three-day weekends. I was gonna get out and do things more. 

To be fair, I did get out occasionally. It just wasn't much more than I had before. That was also the year that Amy retired, so she was out doing things a lot more often-- big hike on the Arizona trail, a month on the Appalachian trail. I wound up holding down the fort, keeping up with the animals. 

October of last year (2025) sucked. We lost both Dulce and Dozer, leaving us with no animals at the house. Somewhere in my funk, I decided I was damned well going to find a silver lining: I don't need to tag off with Amy any more for travel.  I set myself a goal: I was going to do some kind of travel once a month in 2026. 

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So far so good.  In January, Amy and I went out to visit her family in Marietta, GA:

In February, I took the ZJ out to explore the 'Dinosaur Diamond' scenic highway (this is not said highway):

And last week, I met up with Austin, Mark, Curtis, and Angelo in Vegas for Austin's birthday festivities: 

The intent here is I'll write up some more about each of these, and maybe keep this place up to date so I can remind myself what I've been up to. 

Assuming I don't forget this thing exists again...