Victoria, British Columbia
April 4, 2011
-----------------------------------------

Travels With Lobo - Retrospectives Edition



It was a recent phone call from my nephew in Ann Arbour, Michigan asking me for information for an intended trip to Alaska that made me realize that time flies and memories fade, especially when it comes to place names and the exact routes that were followed.

That is a polite way of saying that I didn't exactly have the details of "Travels With Lobo - The Alaska Version", a trip that I made in 2007, at the tip of my tongue.

That left me lamely repeating the phrase “the details are in my blog, you can read it there”. The truth is that, since the Alaskan blogs, I have been busy blogging Hawaii, Mexico and Panama. I am a slow and methodical blogger and there has been little time to look back. Instead I look forward to blogging trips more recently made to Costa Rica and Nicaragua that lie in the “under construction” phase and may never be finished due to even more recent plans.

My main purpose of writing a travel blog is the preservation of beautiful memories and especially the many photographs that can be shared with others. I travelled a lot previous to my Travelpod era that started in 2007 with the trip to Argentina. But where are the photos and memories?

The photos for the most part are gone, victims of various moves and changes of technology. However, I doggedly cling to a large box of slides of my first trip to Europe in 1972 with my first love. The photos are awaiting conversion to a modern media that will probably never happen. Somewhere in the storage unit is also a plastic bag containing extensive travel notes of my bicycle touring trips I used to make in Europe. I haven’t seen the bag recently and I am hoping it survived our latest move (2010) from Prince George, BC to Victoria, BC. Come to think of it, they may very well have been in the two large boxes that were lost by the moving company. Even if not lost, the notes are in the wrong media (paper) and they may never be converted, if found, due to other priorities.

Most trips are too beautiful, memorable, educational and expensive to be forgotten and hence evidence of these trips should not be left somewhere in a box to be lost by a moving company. Yes, I know there are general memories that survive but the delight lies in the details.

Besides, every time I re-work my trips in one way or the other I consider it as having lowered the average cost of the trip as I relive the experience.

That leads me again to the advantage of having a travel blog. Realizing that nothing is forever, the thoughts and memories of travels are on the website for future reference and until www.travelpod.com  goes “off the air” so to speak, the writings and photos shall continue to be there and not lost in some box.

Speaking of the possibility of Travelpod going “off the air”, would it not be a good idea to have a backup of sorts?

It would be a good idea if the backup served at least as a PHOTO RETROSPECTIVE of all the blogs written – after all, isn’t a photo worth a thousand words?

It was that line of thinking that led to the creation of:

Travels With Lobo – PHOTO RETROSPECTIVE Edition

I would be the first to admit that this is nothing revolutionary. Rather it is evolutionary in that I am evolving slowly from one media “Travelpod” to another “YouTube”.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not leaving Travelpod as I have nothing but the highest regard for Travelpod. The site has evolved greatly into a very user-friendly site that makes travel blogging fun. I will certainly continue blogging once the next phase is completed.

YouTube is almost entirely a video format and in “Travels With Lobo – PHOTO RETROSPECTIVE Version” I have almost no video except for the sea lion in the Sea Center in Seward, Alaska – Retrospective no. 7, Alaska Part 3 – Anchorage, Kenai Peninsula , Seward.

So what do I have? I have packaged the PHOTO RETROSPECTIVES of Travels With Lobo into snappy 10-minute slideshows with music. To add dialogue would have taken months. Furthermore, the dialogue is in the written blogs.

Technically, the PHOTO RETROSPECTIVES were done on my MacBook with iMovie 11. This proved to be a lovely learning experience relatively trouble-free until I had about 25 RETROSPECTIVES on my hard drive and everything came to a grinding halt as I had run out of RAM.

That proves that you can only push a good thing so far. This prompted me to go one step further and buy a My Book 1.5 T external hard drive that I connected to my MacBook (unfortunately, I don’t have a MacBook Pro) using the Time Machine feature that is contained in the latest Apple OS – X Snow Leopard.

Time Machine backs up the hard drive in chronological fashion meaning that it tracks changes automatically that are made each day.

With this system I could finally start removing the original RETROSPECTIVES from my hard drive to free up some RAM. Once that task was accomplished, iMovie 11 worked beautifully again.

The music aspect of my TRAVELS WITH LOBO – RETROSPECTIVE Version was another eye opener. Wouldn’t it be nice to put the Beatles “Let it Be”, for example, as background music? Well, you can’t, since most music is royalty protected.

That started a search for royalty free music and the realization that it is not plentiful and most of it is not to my liking. It was useful when I discovered that YouTube has a feature called “Audio Swap” that allows for royalty free music to be attached to a presentation. That’s great, except like I said previously, most of the music is not to my liking.

I am just now (April 3, 2011) starting to work on the Mexico: 23 Destinations in Which to Spend the Winter Months and wouldn’t it be nice to have Mexican music. Do a search of “Mexico Royalty Free Music” and there are several sites that pop up. Closer examination reveals that the music maybe “royalty free” but it is not free.

So if you are hearing music that is not to your liking, remember it is not an easy task to find the right music, notwithstanding that music can make or break a presentation.

Returning to my first paragraph, it was my nephew’s query about Alaska that got the ball rolling for TRAVELS WITH LOBO – PHOTO RETROSPECTIVE Version. My nephew has since changed his mind and is no longer going to Alaska due to time restrictions. However, producing the RETROSPECTIVES serves the purpose of reliving most of my blogged travels. In addition, it provides a backup of sorts for my blogs. It also introduced me to new technology – iMovie 11 and it was a great way to pass the winter evening hours in Victoria, British Columbia.

I enjoy the experience of creating the Photo Retrospectives and Barbara enjoys viewing them as much as I do. As with the blogs, she is my final and only editor/proof reader.

By the way winters in Victoria are by far the best available in Canada. The grass is green in the winter, the daytime temperatures hover in the range of 6 – 10 deg. C and we have had only two snowfalls so far this winter. It is not Arizona but for Canada it is great.

I am presently only about half finished with the PHOTO RETROSPECTIVES as I have completed retrospectives for Northwest Territories, Yukon, Alaska and Hawaii.

Tomorrow I am looking forward to starting on the expat series: Mexico: 23 Destinations in Which to Spend the Winter Months” and later “ Panama – 8 Destinations to in Which to Spend the Winter Months”. Once this is completed, in about two months, video will be the name of the game.

“Lobo’s 20,000 Kilometre Road Trip: Touring Canada and the U.S.A. in Search of Scenery” will be the theme and 53 hours of raw video will provide the materials for Travels With Lobo – YouTube version.

Some of the highlights of the trip that took me all the way to New York City from the west coast of Canada were the many video interviews that I recorded along the way.

I am frankly excited about getting going on this project. It won’t be great, it won’t be terrific but it was my trip and it closes the circle of experiences and memories lived and maybe already forgotten along the way.

Hopefully by next winter I will be all caught up with my video blogging so that we can undertake the trip postponed next winter (January 2012) – “????????? - 5 Destinations in Which to Spend the Winter Months”. This time I will be equipped with an HD video camera.

“YouTube – Travels With Lobo – Retrospective Version” can be found at:

www.youtube.com/user/travelswithlobo



As mentioned, to date – April 3, 2011 - I have completed 25 PHOTO RETROSPECTIVES for the Northwest Territories, Yukon, Alaska and Hawaii.

At the YouTube website scroll down to find a destination that might interest you. The most recent Retrospective posted will be at the top of the list.


-----------------------------------------------

Feedback:

e-mail: travelswithlobo@yahoo.com

-----------------------------------------------