Departure Odometer was 200,338 km (124,484 mi). Arrival Odometer is 225,417 km (140,058 mi). Did 25,079 km (15,583 mi). Not as much as last year's 34,000 km (21,126 mi).

I took over 5,431 photos (10.4 G of disk), around last year's 5,500+, weeding them out more aggressively before I sent them home. About 4,198 of those pics are on the 60 pages of this blog, plus another 330 images created for maps and diagrams, and 18 pics for Artifacts.

I was away for 196 days, less than the 211 of last year.

I was in 8 different states (in order of first visit). No new ones this year.

• From home to the Valley:
  Montana . Idaho . Utah . Nevada . California

• From the Valley to Dallas:
  Arizona . New Mexico . Texas

Here's a clickable map of some of the overnight trips I made, and some day trips or stops on the way. Pick a marker to see what I blogged about that place. A, H, and L have two sides: departure on the right, arrival on the left.

Google Maps says this is 10,485 km (6,515 mi), 95 hours.

Or use the table below. There's also a larger map . Points that aren't listed were either not blog-worthy or are covered by other points.

These are all the routes of significance I could remember or reconstruct from blog entries.

While in Dallas   Routes travelled from Dallas, TX

I was in nearly every easily-recognizable Texas municipality, with the exception of Lubbock and perhaps Paris . There's not a lot of recreational driving around Dallas that isn't like what I know from home: flat farmland and straight roads except around Texas Hill Country and even those roads were pretty plain. That probably contributed to the 9,000 km (5,500 mi) difference in mileage between last year and this. There aren't any other maps worth showing here.

Categorized museums and parks I visited, in order of visit.

I saw 2 live hockey games: 1 in Los Angeles and 1 in Dallas.

Creating museum posts takes a bit of time, and it's large ones like the Nethercutt Collection, with probably 200 images, that test my sanity and my process. And get me thinking about how to do 'bulk' things faster. The largest processing task by far is for images - I can made words pretty quickly - and I have some tools to automate some things as they become mind-numbing to do manually.

For the purposes of procrastinating on doing The Nethercutt and collecting my process into one place and maybe learning something useful about it, here's what I do. Things in italics are automated.

1. Get images to the point of posting:
   1. camera to laptop ~/Documents via microSD
   2. rename all images to YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg My Canon PowerShot SX230 HS names every image IMG_nnnn.jpg. My Samsung Galaxy Note makes image filenames as timestamps.
   3. laptop review for bad - delete unless I feel they might be useful
   4. upload to desktop at home On cheap-hotel wireless this can take hours or overnight, perhaps failign several times and needing a restart. In a few hotels I had a 100 MB wired connection and it took minutes.
   5. copy uploaded images to ~images-home
   6. move uploaded images to ~/Documents/done

2. in ~images-home, organize for (perhaps later) posting.

   Collect images of a particular YYYYMMDD into one or more folders based on what happened on that day and how many posts those images will represent. Folders are named something like YYYYMMDD_[0,1,..]_SomeTitle. Divert some images, like while in-transit, into a collection for a summary post, like Texas Water Towers.

3. Make a working set of images, and move the YYYYMMDD... over into done where the master set of images lives.

4. Prepare the working set:
   1. Map-making. A map, or maps, is always an easy way for me to get into starting a post. And for future trips, I can do it in advance from the mapping I do for the trip anyway. I use screen-snaps from Google Maps. Since my desktop video is bigger than my laptop video the maps I make from home are bigger and/or easier to pose.
   2. Review for familiarity, fitness/utility, storyboarding. I use Gwenview , an open source image viewer that's the default for images for my KDE desktop environment. It also has several plugins that I've used for image manipulation.
   3. Orientation adjustment - rotate vertical images to what the camera said they should be (in the image's EXIF data). Fine-tune rotation, especially for rectangular subjects like paintings in frames.
   4. Copy changed images to done/YYYYMMDD... so the master copy can benefit from the above adjustments.
   5. Panorama creation. New this year, since I found I had a Gwenview plugin that does a generally excellent job with the images I throw at it. My camera doesn't do this and it's a feature I want in my next one. My phone might, but I don't think so.
   6. Copy new (e.g., panoramas and maps) images to done/YYYYMMDD... so the master set can have the accompaniments I made for it for this post.

5. Storyboard the post based on the working set of images:
   1. Prepare working set list (WSL), marking images that are vertical.
   2. Review WSL to exclude any images which are useful to the post but won't be part of it. (e.g., signs, exhibit cards, "reminders").
   3. Turn the WSL into a list of images (WSL-Use) to be copied over into ~blog-images.
   4. Review WSL-Use against image set for storyboard blocking and layout. Collections of horizontal vs vertical are important here. For places like a museum, galleries and layout will determine or influence blocking.
   5. Use WSL-Use to create template blocks for each image for cut/paste into a post.

6. Open a post:
   1. Open a post from a template and edit fields.
   2. Write (or revisit) the introduction. Maybe write an ending.
   3. Create templates for each storyboard block (and sub-block if necessary).

7. Write the post. For each storyboard block or sub-block:
   1. Copy one or more image block templates into a storyboard block or sub-block.
   2. Adjust order for shots that are better grouped together regardless of their chronological order. Sometimes I didn't shoot in the best order; sometimes a group of vertical and horizontals work better; sometimes I got a better shot later.
   3. Fill in templates from image review. Transcribe from signs and exhibit cards. Research with source-location's website, or just Googling. This is the least-automatable part of the process - OCR would really help. But I learn things.
   4. Adjust for image caption lengths. Man, those middle-ages Europeans had looong names and used some loooooong titles.

8. Finish the post:
   1. Review the whole post. Look for image blocking adjustments, errors, more writing, edits.
   2. Review the opening. Write a closing.
   3. Adjust post timestamps.
   4. Update blogs index.
   5. Update main blog page, at least timestamps, perhaps (Not Ready Yet) marker.

9. Publish the post: push to web server. On this trip I learned how to push from my laptop right to my web server, rather than remote-control my desktop like last year. This made production and posting way more portable, and viable.

10. Archive:
    1. Backup web server to desktop backup disk.
    2. Backup blog and images (working and published) to desktop backup disk, and web server.
    3. Backup desktop backup disk to cloud server. This can take hours for a real big post.

That's enough for now - I think I got it, and there will be edits while I work through the last catch-up entry: The Nethercutt Collection, ready in a day or so, or so - it's a biggie.

But now I'm out of history, so this adventure ends.

I must acknowledge several people without whose participation and help and forebearance I would never have gone, and seen, and done.

TFS for ... possibilities · friendship · hospitality · adventuresome spirit · affability · directions · patience · acceptance · easy laughs · imagination · organization · surreptitious photography · many, Many things. Everything, really. AS, Jake and Tucker and Kiera and Bella, and TFS's family for much of the same. PM for watching my home, tech support, and being interested and in contact. TO for depositing my paycheques, and most importantly Apalon. Nikki for unknowingly starting me on the road over two years ago with a NASCAR race in Bristol, Tennessee. And you, for reading. Thank you all!

Texas Hill Country on the way to San Antonio, TX Grand Canyon Day