Firing the Blog up Again

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been over a year since I last blogged.

And in the meantime, I've gotten 36 comments on old posts. Most of those were spam. So it goes.

I first blogged before there was something called a blog. I called it a travel journal. We spent about 7 weeks in Costa Rica in 1994 and I kept a journal every day.

Hold up. Back up eleven years.

Technically, my first travel journal was in November 1983, when I traveled to Israel with my mom and aunt. My grandmother worked at the Baha'i World Centre in Haifa, and we stayed with her for about 3 weeks and went on Baha'i Pilgrimage. Since I missed so much school, my teachers assembled a packet of stuff for me to complete. A daily travel journal was a requirement for my Language Arts teacher (probably...honestly, I don't remember who wanted what. I think my math teacher, Mr. Klauder, wanted me to research the Israeli currency and do a report for the class. Shekels.)

This sixth grade travel journal was a place to record the things I noticed, things I ate, places I went. I remember my dad criticized that I primarily logged the mundane day-to-day things ("This morning I ate corn flakes for breakfast") but the beauty of a journal or a blog or a diary, whatever you want to call it, is that you write it for yourself. You write the things that are meaningful to you. So, yes, I was on a religious pilgrimage in a foreign country, and there were undoubtedly an overwhelming number of cultural differences to take in, but for an 11-year-old, sometimes you want to log the corn flakes.

1994. Costa Rica. I'm not even sure I had a computer yet and laptops were still years away. I wrote my travel journal the old-fashioned way...long hand on a legal pad. Years later, I typed it into a Word document.

By 1998, when we returned to Costa Rica, my father-in-law had a computer. For the first time I typed my journals (usually while two-year-old Sofia was napping), and for the first time, I could email them to family members. Dial up, baby. I remember it was expensive to connect during the day, so we had to wait until evening to send emails. Ha.

My first travel blog was our 2006 trip to Costa Rica. The biggest advantages to blogging were that I could include photos (we bought our first digital camera in 2005) and people could read my blogs at their leisure, instead of waiting for an email.

I've blogged each trip abroad since then, although that's not as impressive as it sounds, since we've only traveled abroad one other time since then, to Costa Rica in 2009.

Until now. Until this summer.

We're going to Europe. Details to come.