On October 28, 2005, I published my first Road Tips blog post on the now-defunct Town Pump in Clear Lake, IA. It was a small, three paragraph entry long before I had a concrete idea or format that I wanted to go with in my blog. In fact, I just re-read the entry and I'm pretty embarrassed. It looked like it was written by a 9th grader who waited until the 11th hour to do a report. (The only reason I think that is because I was once a 9th grader who waited until the 11th hour to write a LOT of reports.) The first couple of years were really choppy and it was difficult to find my voice. It took some time, but I eventually found my way to the scheme of things that eventually became the signature of Road Tips.
Five years ago today, I wrote an entry on the 10 year anniversary of the blog. It included the history of Road Tips, my inspirations, and other sorts of things that shaped the blog into what it was then. (Click here to read that post.) Quite actually, the format hasn't changed much - if any - since that 10 year anniversary entry.
As we all know, it's been a difficult year. With travel all but shut down for me back in March, you've allowed me to go back into the archives and dust off some of the more memorable visits to restaurants and places I've been to over the years. It's been sort of fun to read some of those entries and reminisce about some very remarkable and unforgettable places I've been to. We took a couple of vacations this year and ate at some pretty good to very good places along the way, so you'll continue to read about those for the next few weeks. Hopefully - and I'm being very hopeful here - I can get back out on the road in early 2021 when life, as we knew it before the COVID-19 pandemic, gets somewhat back to normal.
As I've said numerous times over the years, many blogs don't last very long and that was even more telling to me when I recently went through my browser bookmarks on my computer of all the blogs that I followed for a number of years. Many of them were food and restaurant blogs, much like Road Tips. There were others that I had picked up along the way and read from time to time. I had 81 blogs bookmarked and I started to go through to see which ones were active and pare down the ones that weren't. It turned out that I trimmed 53 blogs out of my bookmarks. Some were abandoned URL's, but many were just inactive with the last entries being anywhere from 3 to 6 years ago. (I found one that I had bookmarked - actually, it was a friend of mine from Michigan - whose last entry was 11 years ago!)
One thing that has happened recently in regard to Road Tips - I've run out of the allotted number of categories that I can use for the blog. I tried to add a couple categories when we went to Northern Minnesota earlier this summer and Typepad won't allow me to add categories any longer. Heck, I don't even know what the limit is or how many categories I even have. I'm too lazy to count them or even find out. I may have to consolidate some of the categories or take some of the ones where there's just one or two entries under a given category (or city) away.
Yes, the pressure is on to maybe go back and edit out some of my previous entries. And that may be hard as I have a bit over 2400 entries over the past 15 years. That's a lot of writing about a lot of restaurants, travel, events, and observations.
But today, I'm not going to go back into the history of the blog, nor am I going to wax nostalgic on the run Road Tips has had. But 15 years is quite a long time in the blogosphere. I've often said that this turned out to be a hobby that has taken on a life of its own. Readership hits go up and down, but I'm happy that there are still people who continue to indulge me to write about my travel experiences.
I'm not certain there will be a 20th anniversary of Road Tips, times change and so do people and trends. There's a lot of places to find reviews of restaurants and travel destinations on the Internet. I'm just happy that I still have enough of an audience after all these years that keeps me going.
Once again, thanks for looking in!
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