I have been back home for a couple of week from my month long Texas Vacation and I haven't posted anything. I have been getting caught up on a bunch of boring stuff, like laundry, getting the windshield replaced in the car and other little chores that I had put off but were still waiting on me when I returned.
Charlotte S. from Ohio who evidently followed my blog sent me a message wanting to know when I was going to post the final summary of the trip. I had good intentions, but a piece of bad luck and a huge mistake on my part has delayed the post of the final trip summary.
To give you a little background, when I travel, I keep a small notebook in the car where I make notes and jot down my daily expenditures for the blog. Then in the evening when I get settled into my hotel room I write the daily blog and enter the information into the spread sheet on my computer.
Well toward the end of the trip, I sort of got lazy and didn't update the last couple of days of the trip on the computer, thinking that I would do it when I got home. The last time I updated the spread sheet was in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
After a couple of days of getting settled back into not having to drag suitcases to the elevator and re-packing the car, I sat down and fired up the computer and Nothing...Absolutely nothing. I thought that I had a dead battery so I plugged it in and tried again.
This time when I turned it on, things got worse.....I got the dreaded blue screen of death on my 12- year old Toshiba Lap Top. No problem, I will just log into my One Drive account pull the information off using the small HP laptop that Wayne gave me before I started my trip.
Or so I thought.....Come to find out the One Drive that I thought was uploading my documents automatically every night on WiFi at the Hotel, hadn't uploaded since San Antonio. I manually upload my photos and videos but documents and other data is set to upload (or so I thought) on WiFi every night at 9 p.m. Something happened and reset the download settings to manual.
I took the Old Toshiba to the computer Doctor and they think they can recover my files. They say they should be able to recover most of my data, pictures and videos and put them on either an external hard drive or a high capacity thumb drive. The problem is the computer doctor that I use is very, very, very good at such projects but they also have a very high number of commercial accounts which come first.
They called today and said that while the computer is basically toast, they will be able to recover most of my data and have it back to me in the next week or 10-days. So it will be a while before I will have all of the final numbers and the final summary posted.
But there is good news, the photos and videos were still on the memory card, and they were all backed up on One Drive and on an external hard drive. The one fear that I have is that I will lose my photos. I am really dedicated in backing up my photos and videos. In fact the very first thing that I do each day when I get into a hotel is back up the photos and videos. While they stay on the Memory card, I also download them to a computer which will send them to One Drive. They also get backed up to an external hard drive. Some say that is over kill, but I am not going to lose my photos I have them saved in about three different locations.
The Photos from the trip are beginning to show up on my FLICKR account so click the link and slide on over there and take a look at them. Their should be new photo posting about every other day. I included a few photos in the daily blog, but those were only a very, very, very, few of the more than 4,000 photos that I took on the trip.
Before you panic, there are not going to be 4,000 photos in the TEXAS VACATION Album. By the time I cull and edit the photos maybe a little more than half will make it to the FLICKR site. In October of 2018 I will have been on FLICKR for 10-years. During that time I have post a little more than 32,000 photos.
And one other bit of good news, is that I have been editing videos and have a few that should start appearing on YOUTUBE in the next few days. I had good intentions of including videos DURING the trip but videos are a lot of work. More work than I wanted to do during the trip. So I made the decision very early on to get video during the trip but I would convert and edit it when I have the time.
I did get a couple videos posted on this trip but dang it was a lot of time and work. I think most of the videos that I posted while traveling were around 10-12 minutes long. Those 10-12 minutes took about 5-6 hours to pull of the card, convert, edit, exports and finally upload.
So over the next few weeks, the photos will be appearing on Flickr, the videos will be showing up on Youtube. Keep checking back on those sites for all the new stuff.
Some of you have ask what's next. Well, I don't know for sure. I am going to spend April at home. May will probably be a few day trips, and maybe a weekend trip or two. I am looking at a Pittsburgh trip for baseball in June when the Dodgers come to town.
If all goes well October will be my next big trip. I am still planning on riding AMTRAK to Phoenix and Joining Chuck and Sharon Shinall for a week in the Valley of the Sun before venturing on to California for a week or so. Then riding AMTRAK back home.
Finally I am looking at heading to Florida early next year and spending some of the cold months in warm sunshine. What I am thinking about is heading to Florida in early February and then leaving from there for my 2019 March Madness Basketball Vacation. One of the sites for the first and Second rounds next year is in Jacksonville, Florida. So that may work out well, and allow me spend some of February and the first of March in Florida, attend the tournament in Jacksonville and then head back home to Virginia. But all that is still in the very early and no doubt will change as the day, weeks and month pass.
So until I get the data recovered from my old laptop, keep checking in of Flickr, YouTube and Instagram for all the new stuff. If you like what you see be sure to subscribe and follow.
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