Thanksgiving blog backlog

We are (for another few minutes, anyway) parked on a public street near my uncle's house in New City, New York (map). We've been here since Tuesday afternoon, so there is not much of a travel update today.

We've had a lovely holiday with my family, most of whom we have not seen in over two years. While that's not really all that long for adults, especially when we all keep in touch by email and here on this blog, it's a very, very long time for a four-year-old, and so we were thrilled when my cousin and his family, who live in Argyle, New York, decided to drive down here on Saturday to see us. Had they not, we would have made the 360-mile round trip ourselves.

The last time we saw our "nephew" (really my first cousin once removed), he was just one and a half. Unsurprisingly, the thing he remembers most about that visit is the bus, which, apparently, he talks about quite a bit. On that visit, we never moved from their driveway, and so yesterday we all piled into Odyssey for a quick 2.5-mile round trip to the nearby Costco. He sat upstairs in the front penthouse seats and was tickled with the trip, although I think he spent most of the time focused on the pets rather than the view.

We gave up our Costco membership some time ago -- there are so few of them around the country, and we really don't have room to store anything that comes in Costco-sized packaging, like 36 rolls of toilet paper, or an entire loin strip of beef. That said, there are some things that Costco just can't be beat on, and we took advantage of my aunt's membership card to stock up on our favorite micro-fiber towels. While we were there, we also picked up a rack of lamb and a can of coffee, as well as some socks. That should cover us for a while.

We had a nice visit with my family, including my folks who drove up Thursday morning from New Jersey and stayed through Saturday to see their nephew and his family. We ended up visiting with everyone in shifts, since my aunt and uncle have odd schedules that mean they never see each other except on Sundays. We basically headed in to the house every day after our first cup of morning coffee, and did not return to the bus until close to midnight each evening, other than to walk the dog. Of course, there was a great deal of eating involved, so I think we'll be eating salads now until next year.

But this brings me to answering the anonymous comment we received here on Friday, taking us to task for, apparently, twittering instead of blogging. Perhaps it is not obvious from reading these posts, especially to anyone who does not maintain his own blog, but each post here takes me a minimum of about half an hour to complete, and some much longer than that. In addition to actually writing the text of what I have to say, I often have to go back and consult the maps to see where we've been, then generate the link to where we are at the moment, as well as search the blog to generate links to previous posts, etc.. So, no, I have not had enough time since our arrival here to post even one regular update to the blog.

This is one of the reasons we've put "our latest tweets" in our sidebar. I can actually tweet from my Blackberry (yes, I know I can blog from there too, but it is much more involved), which gives me a way to post a quick status here on the blog when we either have no time or no Internet access to post a regular update. Those who also follow me on Twitter know that we've set up the reverse direction as well, with an automatic tweet any time I update the blog (leading to the occasional redundancy of having the "latest tweet" box reading the same as the latest blog entry). This is mostly a convenience for the "blog junkies" among our readers -- you know who you are.

My blogging goal, of late, has been to post at least once from every different location in which we've stayed at least one night. Occasionally, I miss that benchmark, but I am still writing here much more than I ever thought I would when we started the blog. In part, that's because we have developed a quite loyal following, with many diverse reasons for reading this blog. It's also because we've found ourselves going back to earlier blog entries time and again to answer our own questions ("where was that nice camp site?" or "when did we replace the steering pump?"). It's this latter reason that keeps me so diligent about posting accurate map links, descriptions, and timelines.

In any case, I would ask our anonymous commenter to remember that this blog is a labor of love. You may notice that we accept no advertising here, and derive no revenue from the blog whatsoever. We even pay each year to maintain our domain name, web site, and photo repository ad-free. So, while I do try to post often enough to keep everyone's attention, it's a bit unfair to berate us for being too involved with family, whom we hardly ever see, to post over the holiday. FWIW.

In a few minutes, we will pack up and head south -- we'd like to be out of the northeast before it gets any colder or the snows come.