I Love travel blogs! Want to know what it’s really like to RV in Alaska? Check out Gundyville’s Blog or Dennis and Carol’s Blog. How about staying in an RV in Mexico for months, even years? Just take a look at George and Tioga’s Blog. Do you keep a blog (an online journal) as you travel? If so, you might be listed in HitchItch.com along with nearly 200 others. If you want to learn all about life as a non-retired fulltime RVer, and get a laugh in the process, then follow the daily blog of Nick Russell and the Gypsy Journal.
Our Blog is Our Memory
We’ve been fulltime RVers since 2003, and I simply cannot imagine being without our blog! So many times we have a question like “Where did we spend our anniversary in 2004?” or “I want to see the pictures from our day on Mackinac Island” or “How many Presidential Libraries have we visited?” 
All these questions can be so easily answered by our blog.
- Where did we spend our anniversary in 2004? This is the easiest question to answer with a blog because every entry is automatically archived by date, so as long as I know that our anniversary is in July, I can view the Blog Archive (see the image at right), expand 2004 then expand July and I can see the entry I wrote about our anniversary.
- I want to see the pictures from our day on Mackinac Island. To handle that, I use the Search feature and typed in “Mackinac.” It searches every word of all 1,500 posts and, in a fraction of a second, it comes up with a link to the post I wrote on that day. Blogger is Google after all – search is their thing!
- How many Presidential Libraries have we visited? Presidential Libraries are on our List! We wanted to visit them all and I believe we have. How can I prove it? With the Blog of course. Each time we visit a Presidential Library I write a post about it and attach a Label for Presidential Library. So now, I can view the list of all my Labels, click on Presidential Library and instantly see all the blog posts over the years where we’ve visited Presidential Libraries.
Holes in the Blog
We are now in our 10th year of Fulltime RVing and I’m getting a bit lazy with the Blog. I never have been one to write every day, but we’ve been so busy this summer that whole weeks have gone by without a post! Facebook is another culprit – because it’s so quick and easy to post a picture, or a few words – I do that, and neglect adding anything to the Blog. I like Facebook a lot, but the Blog is our foundation. If it’s not in the Blog, I’m likely to forget it ever happened!
Do you Have a Blog?
We give seminars at RV Rallies entitled “Every RVer Needs a Blog.” We really believe that! So many people would love to live the RV Lifestyle, we think it’s downright stingy not to share it. But,even if you don’t share it, having a blog is the easiest way to keep your own journal with text and pictures that you can reference anytime. You can even make it into a coffee table book to enjoy without a computer! If you want to learn how to make a blog, you will find tutorial videos at GeeksOnTour.com
What about you? Do you have a Blog? Or do you just use Facebook, or photo albums? If you have a blog you’d like to share, leave the address in a comment here.
Chris, what have you heard about Blog-Train.net — http://blog-train.net/?l=1985487548354096 ? I got an email today inviting me to post my blog URL to get new readers. I’m not looking for numbers or exposure, but also don’t want to get sucked into something potentially harmful or spam generating. (Norton lists it as a SAFE site), http://whois.domaintools.com/blog-train.net shows Los Angeles contacts but it bounces from Germany.
CoolJudy
Looks to me to be a safe aggregator of blogs, there to make money. It does not seem to work with WordPress blogs. If you are not looking for numbers or exposure, why bother?
Our blog would not have happened if not for the “Geeks On Tour” seminar at the FMCA rally in March 2011 (Perry, GA). It was fun to post about our “wish list” motorhome that found us in June at the Good Sam Rally in Louisville. Now the house in on the market and we’ll be living in the motorhome awaiting retirement in July 2013. Then we plan to post dailly. http://www.seeingtheusa.com
I started a blog a while after I retired and went on my first trip. One of the great things about blogger is that you can date the posts when they actually happen so I was able to go back and create posts from the beginning. Since I also use Picasa, it was easy to use the pictures I had taken to create the posts and they are all in order. This year I have several women friends who are in Alaska and I strongly encouraged those who don’t post often to do so just so they would have a complete record of their trips for themselves as well as for those of us who arm-chair traveled with them. Posting on Facebook is quick and easy but doesn’t leave you with the kind of record you will want later on.
You can read my blog at http://travelinglongdogs.blogspot.com
longdog2
I started blogging in May, 2011 before heading to Alaska. Getting mentioned in other people’s blog like Nick Russell, Sharon DelRosario, and others did help directing readers to my website and creating “followers”. I now have about 60 subscribers and more than 43,400 hits — many from people I have yet to meet or from people who actually have stopped me on the street, at dump stations, or in rest areas and have come up and asked, “Aren’t you CoolJudy? I read your blog and knew you were in the area.”
When we are in home mode, the topics tend to be family oriented and are not as often, which I think “bogs my blogs”. Because of the longer times they cover, they become too long.
I have also been using Facebook to stay current but it is not the travel journal I want. Guess I’d better finish the draft I started last week. It is a month behind.
You can read my blog at http://www.coolrvers.blogspot.com.
— CoolJudy