works of wanderlust

Tag: blogging

  • What counts as a “visit” when traveling?

    I have a rule about traveling.

    Specifically, I have a rule about how I talk about traveling.

    When someone asks have you ever visited a place then my response is often… well… technically, that depends… sorta… kinda… here let me explain…

    A night shot of a European hotel.

    So, here. Let me explain.

    I’ve been poking through a lot of travel blogs lately. Thanks to the Twitter algorithm and the types of things I post I get recommended so many accounts that are hashtag-travel, and (I assume) vice versa, because that’s a good fraction of the folks who follow me first. Those blogs tend to fall into two categories:

    a) bloggers for money, who are (or who are trying to be) social media influencers, posting lots of gorgeous photos and extensive articles on very specific vacations, and

    b) bloggers for passion, who are (often) folks or couples in their 20s living their best life and writing about it while having this goal of “visiting 10 new countries every year” or “visiting 100 countries before I turn 30!”

    This second group tends to make me think about my own definition of what constitutes a visit.

    To clarify, an example: about five years ago the family and I spent 10 days travelling through Iceland, stopping at numerous small towns and moving on the next morning, eating, drinking, spending, taking lots of photos. Two years ago we had a layover at the airport in Iceland, ate some breakfast at the restaurant there, bought some snacks, and left a few hours later. In my mind, we’ve only visited Iceland once. I don’t count an airport layover as a visit.

    Another example: In 2006 or so we did a bus tour of Eastern Europe, one of those Contiki party trips where they shuttle you from city to city, hotel to hotel, bar to bar, and you take lots of pictures, drink yourself silly, and remember the blur twenty years later. Between a hotel in Budapest and a hotel in Krakow, the bus stopped for lunch in a small city in Slovakia. Can I tell people I’ve visited Slovakia? I had a delicious pizza lunch in an old town patio that I still don’t know how we successfully ordered from the waitress who spoke almost no English, but I honestly don’t claim that I’ve “visited” Slovakia. I don’t tend to count it on my list of visited countries.

    So this brings me back to my rule about how I talk about traveling.

    What counts as a visit for me?

    Personally, it’s a basic rule: an overnight, a meal, and time on feet in the street.

    If I count a place visited it means I’ve slept there, eaten, and wandered about. None of this “I drove through and stopped for coffee” or “I had a layover at the airport there once” stuff.

    What do you count as a visit?

  • Two Months of Blogging Lessons

    The thing about writing a daily blog is that you’ve got to, well… write daily. I’m not looking for pity or sympathy. In fact, I signed up for this and I’m loving it as a way to start my weekdays or settle into a weekend.

    It does often take effort to figure out my topic, though.

    A wintery city scape of downtown Edmonton, Alberta.

    Today is the start of month three of daily blogging, and this post is number sixty.

    Yes, sixty!

    I’m not looking to ramp up my traffic. Obviously I’m not making money from more traffic. (No ads!) But I am interested in why people are visiting. Two months of data and fifty-nine previous posts are not much data to go on for a tried and true analysis of what people are interested in reading about, but it might be enough to give me an insight or two into coming up with some new topic ideas.

    According to my internal stats, my top five posts of the last two months are:

    1. Comics: Backpacking with Kids, a post where I shared some of my old comic strips recalling the deep woods inspiration and the struggles of parenting in the wilderness.

    2. Snowshoes on a Frozen Suburban Creek, a fairly long “adventure journal” post about an afternoon spent snowshoeing on a local frozen creek, and had some pretty photos to go along with it.

    3. Honey Brown Sourdough (Part Two), a post detailing the results of my honey brown been sourdough experiment, and a post I dropped into the daily thread of a local morning radio show conversation about bread giving me lots of new visitors.

    4. Backpacking: Foggy Mountain Bridges, a post talking about a multi-day backpacking adventure, the experience of hiking with kids, and with a pretty nice photo to accompany it.

    5. Guinness Sourdough (Part Two), another post detailing beer bread and the results of my Guinness beer sourdough experiment, and not unintentionally dropping the name of a famous stout into the title.

    Yet none of this makes much sense when it comes to what people are actually searching for and clicking on. Based on my Google Search Console results, the searches that castironguy.ca appeared in most were:

    chasing waterfalls iceland
    backyardultra
    cookout cast
    rome waffle iron
    campfire waffle iron

    The only reasonable conclusion I can make from these bits of data is to mash this all together and generate some random blog posts I should probably write.

    Right?

    For example:

    Backyard Ultra Race Comics could be a series of dramatic cartoons detailing the epic story of an underdog runner training for an ultra-marathon but then ultimately settling for the disappointment of an online-only virtual event hosted on Zoom during a pandemic where instead of traversing the wilds of Canada on foot, he does laps around his suburban neighbourhood. I could probably re-use a lot of my background scenery art.

    Backpacking Beer Bread for Kids could be a deeply researched article on the effects of the family spending a week in the woods with a bag of flour, a sourdough starter, a case of beer, and two teenagers who are still too young to consume alcohol (at least in Canada!) The premise of this writing would be that since kids complain about nearly everything they eat (unless it’s chicken fingers and french fries) eventually, far from civilization, they would come to love and cherish the nutty flavour of campfire baking.

    Icelandic Sourdough Campfire Waffles could be an article (or a series of articles) about a weeklong trek to a remote Icelandic waterfall under which I will set up a campsite, make some batter from a blend of fresh glacial water and my sourdough starter, and then cook waffles in a hot cast iron. The photos will be spectacular. I’m currently open to a sponsor to pay for this trip after the pandemic ends.

    …or, maybe I’ll just stick to my regular, simpler topics.

  • Writing Up a Reason

    Something funny happened nearly three years ago in the months following a sad decision to shutter my sixteen-year-old blog.

    I did less.

    No, really.

    I took fewer photos. I went on fewer adventures. I engaged less and less with new projects. I virtually stopped attempting to tackle new skills.

    A silhouette holding a camera walks down a rocky mountain path.

    Admittedly, I was busier day-to-day with being a responsible human, busier outside of the fun, hobby-type things I generally wrote about. There was just less free time.

    I had taken on a new job with significantly more responsibility (which brought with it more risk of personal-meets-professional exposure from some of the things I was posting) and the job overall just gobbled up more of my life.

    Yet somehow, looking back on it, there was a clearly corresponding relationship between the things I wrote about and the volume of interesting things in which I participated.

    Writing gave me a reason to do stuff.

    I needed content for my blog, yes.

    Yet, in writing I also inspired myself to think about things I had never tried, and motivated myself to try those things… then write more about having tried them.

    Having spent nearly forty days on this new blog, a blog that is still very young and particularly hamstrung by a pandemic and brutally cold winter weather, I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about why I’ve decided to start blogging again with this renewed daily vigor.

    There are people who write for money and fame.

    There are some who write to find peace and clarity.

    And there are still others who write for passion and inspiration.

    There is overlap between any and all these purposes, of course, but after nearly two decades and multiple blogs, I’ve realized much of my purpose is simply to find a reason to do more. I want to write up those reasons here.

    I want to cook better food.

    I want to seek deeper adventure.

    I want to frequent the outdoors.

    I want to explore lesser traveled trails.

    Writing a blog inspires me to step out the front door and make choices that lead me out into the world to do these things more often and more deliberately. It’s an aspirational space, and a source of inspiration for myself and others.

  • One Month Down, Many to Go

    February one. It is the first day of the second month of 2021 and so also the start of my second month of daily blogging here on castironguy.ca.

    I thought about writing of the challenge of finding time, space, and focus to write here every day for a whole month, and while those words may describe the experience, they don’t explain it all.

    Snowy footprints on a concrete sidewalk.

    Sunday afternoon I went for a neighbourhood walk with my wife. Along the way we chatted, and one of the topics was mental health. And I know; if you’ve been anywhere online or reading the news lately, all anyone talks about is mental health.

    It’s important, yes.

    We should talk about it, of course.

    It has been relevant for myself and my family for generations, more than I can elaborate on here without going into long personal anecdotes that I’m not ready to share.

    See, talking about it is not the problem I personally face.

    On the other hand, while everyone talks about it, few people give others the tools and skills to deal with fixing declining mental health and decreasing mental fitness.

    For example, we talk about mental health frequently in meetings at work. These meetings are long, exhausting video conferences that often go overtime and blur into the next time slot. I have made it my 2021 mental health mission to add into every one of these conversations that if we actually want to improve mental health we can start by ending this meeting five minutes early so that everyone can have a short break to get a coffee… or stretch… or pee.

    My own personal mental fitness program is a multi-part effort.

    I spend time outdoors, walking, running, and adventuring, enjoying nature and the beautiful world in which I live to improve my physical well-being.

    I spend time with my family, friends (when I can), and my dog, sharing love, food, time, and energy with those around me to improve my emotional well-being.

    I spend time writing, drawing, and creating interesting things (such as this blog) that I can nuture, refine and share to improve my mental well-being.

    Simple actions. Real balance.

    So, as I post the first post of the second month of a daily blog, looking ahead to more months … a year … or even many years of writing, this is simply me acknowledging that is much more complex than just work. Sometimes the very point a thing is actually all about the challenge of finding time, space, and focus because that’s what gives it value in the first place.

  • Comic: Kicking off Gaige and Crick

    I alluded in a previous post that I was fumbling through the idea of starting another web comic as a kind of spiritual sequel to the comic I stopped drawing about two years ago now.

    I think it would make a great addition to a daily blog like this and allow me to supplement the wordy nature of daily blogging with something unique and more visual.

    It’s not much to look at yet, but it blossomed out of an idea to take an art style I’m comfortable with and a legacy of drawing comics about parenting and then extrapolating it into a story about a guy and his dog and their adventures through the backcountry.

    I fussed through some concept work over the last couple days and did some loose sketching on my iPad:

    Rough sketch of a cartoon man and a dog walking up a mountain trail.

    I roughed that out in my go-to vector editing program, Inkscape, first playing around with a character design and getting the models where I liked them. What resulted was some basic art and recycling of the some of the assets from my former comic to rough out the scene:

    A rough vector art cartoon of a man and a dog hiking.

    I did another hour or so of work to build some updated custom scenery, specifically looking at how I can do “nature” better if that’s going to be the primary setting for a future strip. I sketched some trees, I cleaned up my backgrounds and worked on some shadowing.

    I’m also keeping to my custom cartooning font that I created and tweaked for use in that aforementioned web comic project.

    The final result was a masthead that I’m reasonably happy sharing as a kick-off to this sub-project:

    Where this goes next is probably going to take me a few weeks or more to get rolling properly. Stories & jokes. Some settings. More art assets. And a schedule for designing and publishing these on this blog.

    Stay tuned.

    The Adventures of Gaige and Crick has taken it’s first step out the front door.