The Blog

This year’s trip has been a delightful adventure, and the experience has far exceeded any of the expectations I had of what retirement would be like; but looking back the real odyssey has not been in living this adventure, but in documenting it.  I had been aware of things like computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and the internet for some time, the people around me were using them every hour; but initially I had come to regard them as clever techno gadgetry for cutting edge consumers with the resources to buy, and the leisure time to play with them.  I was still living with a rotary telephone in the bedroom.

Just before last year’s trip my father’s health took a turn for the worse.  Suddenly I had grave reservations about pulling the trigger on, what for me was, an extravagant three week vacation which had been in the elaborate planning stages for the best part of a year.  My father was a man who loved a well turned phrase and had a great sense of humor; he was also an endlessly positive man who wanted to see me make the trip.  I knew that with satellites and cell phones I could talk directly to him several times a week and monitor his situation.  My bargain to myself at the time was that I would email him short entertaining accounts of where we were, what we were doing, and when possible, attach digital pictures to the text.  It would be an instantly deliverable version of the postcards people used to send in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and I knew he would enjoy them.  An unanticipated boon to the process was that I could get 24 hr. feedback from them as well, so I began to attach a regular group of family members and friends to the address headings.

A couple of weeks into this year’s trip Kathy set me up a blog site from which to publish “Postcards from Samos.”  The initial effect was that I all but stopped hearing from the folks back home.  I didn’t know if they just didn’t know how to access the stories from the link, or if they were just no longer responding to them.  When the postman comes only once a day, I don’t sweat the mail, but when email could come any minute of the day, I catch myself checking it more often than I do my watch, which is an amazing transformation from when I would go for months at a time without looking at it.   I used to spend more time deleting emails than I did reading them. 

The second thing I noticed was that “Postcards” was being read by more people globally, than by the folks back home for whom it was being written.  There were more people in Greece alone reading the blog on a daily basis, than there were in the U.S., with additional hits coming from Russia, Turkey, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil, Canada, the U.K., Hong Kong, Iraq, Estonia, Latvia, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Poland, Australia, and South Africa.  The compulsion went from checking the email to tracking blog hits from the time of a posting to see how it was being followed from country to country as the Earth turned and the time zones changed.  It has been fun and I have enjoyed writing the stories, but I think it’s time to give it a rest, at least until next year.  When I step onto that plane tomorrow, I’ll be ready to get back home to Mayport.

 

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