Going On Vacation. Will Be Posting About Travel Every So Often.
Many of you know I bought a motorcycle earlier in the year. Since I was a kid of around 15 years of age, and watched the movie Easy Rider at a friends house, I dreamed of taking a ride cross country on a motorcycle. I forgot all about this dream vacation till I started riding again this summer. Now close to 50 years old, I realized if I don't act now, I will probably never cross this off my bucket list. The Dood's back is sore, and lets face it, The Dood's not getting any younger!
As the colder weather has arrived and I spend more time indoors, I've had plenty of time to think about this. I decided I want to try and make this cross country journey a reality. Next summer I plan on taking a couple mini vacations around New York State and the Great Lakes region as a test run, then if all goes well and I think I can make the journey, I'm planning on hopping on my bike and taking a three week vacation from New York, through the mid west to San Francisco, down to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and then through the lower south west and back home!
I began writing out goals I need to meet, equipment I'll have to buy, and organizing various internet links, maps and other things online. I never planned on writing a travel blog, but decided that a blog would be a great way to organize all this information. It would also be a great way to document everything involved and have a written record of my actual journey after I've completed all the tasks.
My first thought was to document everything on the Steem blockchain using Steemit. However, the point of the travel blog was to organize my information and the Steemit platform wasn't able to meet the requirement I had set for organizing all my information. Although Steemit allows us to use hashtags there really isn't a way to search a single feed by hashtag only. So lets say I wanted to just pull up posts by @the-bitcoin-dood about hashtog maps, or all my information on Las Vegas, I don't think I have that option or at the least the technical know how to incorporate this feature.
Feeling like an unfaithful lover who was about to cheat on his better half I began to look for other solutions. Having created themes in the past on Tumblr I quickly realized it had everything I needed. I could search my personal blog by keyword, and also set up hash tag links by category. So if I want to pull up all my research on Arizona I can just click a link on the sidebar of my blog and pull up all the info I gathered on Arizona, or topics like backpack cooking, recipes, maps, etc.
I selected a basic blog theme that I knew would be easy to edit, added the hashtag links to the sidebar, (circled in green) I'll be adding more shortly. I decided this was a simple solution that had exactly what I needed. I could now search my blog by keyword, organize by hashtags, and have all my information easily searchable and in one place.
As for the guilt of feeling like a unfaithful lover and cheating on my beloved Steemit; I realized this could actually be a good thing. I can organize my data on tumblr, and blog about my updates, and adventures on Steemit. By sharing my links on Tumblr, I could introduce new bloggers to the Steemit platform by posting the update links and stories in my tumblr blog, and if anyone from Steemit wanted to search my research, I'll post a link at the bottom of each travel post to access the blog and all its searchbable features. So tumblr acts as a repository for links, maps, and research, and Steemit is where I'll be doing my actual writing and blogging about my preparations, and progress.
I was going to originally make the blog private and password protect it, but then figured, hey, if I'm going to create a blog, others may be considering the same sort of journey. At the very least someone else may find the info useful, and hopefully others will have suggestions that have already taken on such an adventure.
With that said, I'll be posting occasionally about travel, and backpacking on a motorcycle. I'm really looking forward to sharing my adventure with you, and hope anyone with experience backpacking and cross country riding that comes across these posts can help guide me on my journey and offer some helpful suggestions!
If anyone wants to check out the travel blog, it can be found here: https://the-dood-travels.tumblr.com/