A Few Notes About Our Upcoming "Van Go" Adventure

The concept of daily geo-travel blogging came to me while traveling between Phoenix and Atlanta - in 2015.  (More about that in a bit.)

[For the purpose of clarity, some of my posts were started and/or finished before and/or after the posted date.  There is no intent of deception in my endeavors here.  As for sudden changes in font size, I don't know why this happens.]

First the "backstory" (blame the coffee and forgive the length):

To recap significant events during the first half of 2015, the most significant was the passing of my first wife Marla on May 1, after an extended decline in her health.  Transpiring during this time also was the preparation of moving to Phoenix by my daughter's family, due to my son-in-law having gotten a job there.

As it was, my wife, son, and I lived in the basement apartment of my daughter's home, in the "mother-in-law suite" (as it is usually called).  Aside from being with her Mom during her final health decline - though we didn't consciously know it - my daughter and her husband wanted to let their older son finish the school year in our church's pre-Kindergarten before this momentous move. 

Meanwhile, my son-in-law had gone ahead to Phoenix a couple of months earlier to begin his job and to find a rental home (he would fly back to Atlanta on most weekends).  Aside from her other duties, my daughter also had to supervise the moving process.  They intended to keep the home, as the Phoenix move was not intended to be permanent.  The home had been in our family since about 1969 or so.

After Marla's passing - we think from a stroke - home events shifted to the final moving preparations for my "upstairs family members" and their older dog, who was better with the kids.  And after a few days off, my son-in-law had to return to his job.  With that concentration of events, my daughter didn't even have time to properly grieve over her Mom's passing and that had an extended effect on her, even after they moved.

During a "kitchen table discussion" with my daughter and her in-laws, plans were revealed that included shipping her SUV and their dog to Phoenix, so the family could fly, instead of enduring a cross-country drive with their two young sons. 

Feeling my own sense of apprehension of the coming changes, while my son had a measure of autonomy with a car and his job, I was the one who faced the prospect of being alone.  After searching for a way to temporarily forego the expected emotional vacuum. 

Because of an at-home back injury, I had given up my part-time job as a Land Survey Assistant in March of 2015.  [I suppose "someone" intended for me to be available to take care of Marla during her last couple of months.  As I like working outdoors, I regretted giving up the job, but "life had other plans".]

With not much else to do, I volunteered to drive the SUV and ferry the dog for the almost 2,000-mile trip, rather than their going through the hassles of shipping the dog and SUV.  The idea was accepted, though as our family had not taken any cross-country vacations in a few years, I wasn't keen on doing it alone.

My son wasn't interested in the idea of a road trip with his Dad (so it goes), so I started asking close friends.  Due to their own work and/or family responsibilities, most of my friends were unavailable.  The only affirmative reply was from my long-time (since 1988 or so) beer can-collecting friend, Neal. 

Because my daughter needed the SUV for her and the kids in Phoenix, Neal and I needed to get cross-country fairly quickly.  And summertime traveling with a dog is a challenge, especially with the heat during gas and food stops.

So the basics of "2015 Arizona Trip #1" were;

1) Get to Phoenix quickly - which we did in about 2 and a half days;
2) Chill out and recharge with the family in Phoenix for a few days and visit some breweries, go to a local beer can show, and see some sites; and
3) Rent a car for the return trip, with plans for visiting and photographing interesting places along the way and visiting some of my wife's relatives.

For a variety of reasons, including my own "disquieted" frame-of-mind and traveling with someone, AND leaving my small laptop at home, the task of daily "progress reports from the road on this blog" just didn't work.  Unlike previous road trips and vacations, I did keep some notes on a legal pad, then transferred them to an inexpensive "composition notebook".  

Also, having forgotten my small laptop, I was prevented from a daily downloading of photos from my small digital camera.  [When I began my transition from 35 mm film to digital cameras in 2002, for years, anything more than small point-and-shoot cameras was way too expensive.] 

By late Spring 2015, that was changing, but I hadn't taken the time to check out the Digital SLR cameras.  Prior to the 1st trip, a good friend had given me a Nikon DSLR that he had dropped, I got it fixed for $97.  That was a good start.]

While in Phoenix, I did try to do a "daily download" to a flash drive by way of a flash drive, using my daughter's Apple laptop.  As I am not an "Apple person", I was unfamiliar with "Apple's way to doing things". 

My daughter was too busy and frazzled to do a daily download herself and she was not yet completely familiar with Apple's "iPhoto" program.  For whatever reason, "iPhoto" has an odd way of separating photos into different categories and scattering the icons and files. 

For the non-Apple programs I use, the time-tagged photos may be separated by notable periods of time (perhaps a few hours), but they are still grouped together to allow me to separate them at will.

I don't know if it was my shortcoming or not, but for instance, during a quick visit to photograph Sunset Crater near Flagstaff, I turned around 180 degrees to photograph parts of the San Francisco Peaks.  For some unknown reason, iPhoto separated the Sunset Crater photos into a different file and "hid" the file to the point where neither my daughter nor I could find them on the laptop.

I also lost my Sedona/Oak Creek photos the same way.  Those photo losses were part of the reason for returning to Phoenix again, about a month later.  Other reasons were posted here and here.