What is this blog for??

I was reviewing previous posts, discovering that I had the most posts for Paris in 2006 when I went with Fernando and Penny for my first time.  Apparently that is because it WAS my first time and I was learning about the city.  Over the years that’s really what the blog has been about:  trip preparation.  I did post what happened each day on the first Camino de Santiago trip in 2007 but I believe I did that retroactively, using my paper journal and photos.  We didn’t really have an internet connection that time.  I remember getting a SIM card in an extra phone we had and adding time to it, and that phone coverage then was very iffy except in the cities.  Things have surely changed with connectivity although I’m not sure what we are going to do this time around:  pay Verizon for a monthly international connection or get an e-sim card.  I better figure that out.

These days I’ve given up on keeping a paper journal but perhaps that’s a mistake.  Lord knows I’m not going to retroactively post our 43 days in Aix-en-Provence.  Will I be too tired in the evening to recap the day’s events?  Or will each day be pretty much the same: the town isn’t that big.  Will I be busy doing French homework in the evenings?  I hope not:  3 hours of class a day is enough.

But if we eat out at a restaurant every day, won’t I have food photos to post??  Although I’ve found that I usually forget to photograph the food until I’ve already finished eating.  Empty plates can only tell you so much.  But I could photograph the menu…. Wait!  That comes even before the food!  All right:  each day I’ll photograph a different food, be it the croissant in the morning, the meal at lunch, or the dinner prep in the aparthotel.  And I’ll try to photograph the 11 other Road Scholar participants. (Correcton: there are 21 participants in our group.  I didn’t see the faint arrow that takes you to a second page.). I hesitate to photograph other people because I feel I’m invading their privacy.  That’s why all my travel photos are of things, especially of food, in its various stages.  Here’s our OAT group in Colombia!  We just finished a graffiti session on some warehouses in Bogotá.  No, I didn’t take the photo, our ringleader Diego did.