I hate clip shows. I avoid year-end “best of” lists. I was never even a fan of the remix CDs that were all the rage a few years ago; they’re so derivative. Nevertheless here I am faced with my own conundrum. As much as I dislike it, I have no choice but to look back and try to recap the past, to summarize and punctuate the last twelve months. You see, today is the one year anniversary of my blog.
One year ago today I logged into my 1&1 account and created a blog at http://allcamino.com/ where only a placeholder had been for years. I didn’t write my first post then. Instead I celebrated with lunch at Tee Nee Thai which became the subject of my first post one week later. After lunch I took a long walk down and up The Alameda from Naglee to Stockton, tweeting with pun fully intended that I was finally “on the road.”
From there it’s been a journey, if you’ll pardon the cliché. I rarely had a shortage of things to write about. I wrote about familiar places like Stanford and The Alameda. I wrote about news events I pulled off of Yahoo! News Alerts or the San Jose Mercury News. I wrote about my own process of discovery: books I’ve read and maps I’ve found. I’ve taken hundreds of photos with my SLR and trusty camera phone and enjoyed sharing them. Some of these things were planned from the beginning; others simply evolved organically.
The centerpiece so far has been my four-part writeup of my day-long bus trip up El Camino Real from San Jose to San Francisco. It was so epic, it nearly killed the blog as I refused to post anything at all until the entire thing was done. It took me two months to start it and two more months to finish it; I didn’t write anything the entire month of February! I finally got it done and I’m proud of the end result, but I’ve learned to be more careful about the scope of things moving forward. I still owe you the reverse trip down El Camino.
My favorite post is El Camino de San Jose because it brings together so many elements of my El Camino experience. I talk about the startling coincidences I’ve encountered which make me laugh out loud and tell me that there’s something beyond myself developing here. I talk about the magical discovery that I actually live on El Camino Real, suggesting I’ve been drawn to this road for longer than I was even aware. I talk about my new found enthusiasm for maps and local history. AllCamino is more than a journey now; it’s a quest.
So what’s ahead? For sure, more of the same, feeling out the ways the world connects to El Camino and writing about them once or twice a week. I need to make a greater effort to bust out of the San Jose and Stanford grooves I find myself in; There’s a whole lotta road out there to cover! I have some behind-the-scenes projects to attend to, like taking control of the underlying WordPress installation and customizing it. A have a goal to people-ize my experiences more. I’m making an attempt to get to know the good folks of El Camino a little better and tap into and contribute to the community which exists here. I really appreciate comments on the posts, and would love to see more chatter. What do you think? (Was that too obvious?)
So today begins year two. By the numbers I have 57 posts and 12 comments. Let’s see if we can triple that next year. I know the next twelve months will have more El Camino Real news, events, restaurants, retail, and transportation. The rest will be history.
At the end of the second year I have 133 posts and 29 comments. Okay so I didn’t reach the goal of tripling those numbers, but I did slightly better than double so that’s progress!