Day Nineteen – September 27, 2018
Guess what? The sun is out again – warm and very pleasant. We discover a special outdoor spot where a chef makes either eggs or omelets to your specifications! Eureka – what a find! My omelet has everything (ham, spinach, peppers, onions, cheese, tomatoes) plus jalapenos and salsa. Dale’s omelet has everything except jalapenos and salsa. Delicious!
With very satisfied stomachs we embark on our plan for the day – writing, writing and more writing. Culling the photos (there are many duplicates that can be discarded; some photos are slightly out-of-focus and they can be deleted); and then file management.
I opt to start writing outside; Dale ops to inside – too much glare on the screen for him to discern the photos.
Paper – You can’t get away from using paper!
We have the AAA travel book, AAA route 66 maps, state maps, and “Here it is route 66” state maps. Nancy has all four on her lap as they all tell a different story, and to get the complete picture you have to read each one as we travel along.
Electronics – We have two GPS screens: One built into the 2018 Honda, and a portable Garmin. The Garmin gives better directions, the Honda gives better terrain information.
Laptops – Both Dale and Nancy use their laptops daily (evenings).
Cameras – We have a total of 7 cameras, but usually only use 3 or 4 each day. We shoot 300 to 600 photos each day. Nancy shoots many photos from a moving car.
Photo file management – We store the photos by date, then by camera name, then by topic/attraction on Dale’s laptop. Photos are backed-up on a three terabyte portable drive daily.
Blog photos – Vertical photos do not work (they display sideways). If we really want to use a vertical photo, then we use the Microsoft snipping tool and to take a digital (computer) snapshot of the original, removing all metadata attached to the original photo so the ‘photo’ will display properly. Example: Nancy Regan
All photos are resized to a much smaller image (800 pixels). Then we cull through the 300-600 photos to see which ones will be used. They are copied to a thumb drive and handed over to Nancy for insertion into the blog on her laptop; she is writing 99.9 percent of the blog. More culling of photos is done at this stage.
Sometimes we feel like we are spending more time on researching, documenting, and blogging than we are vacationing. That all said, what a great time we are having!!!!
And that is our day – all day. We forget to eat lunch! We do stop a few times to walk around the hotel pool and grounds, trying to get some physical exercise into the day.
At the end of the day we are pleased we made so much progress but are daunted by the task of trying to grasp all of yesterday’s events. Let’s put that off for a bit.
Dinner back at the hotel restaurant – the special of the week: beef quesadillas. Quite good! Back in our room we start packing things up to get ready for our next adventure.
Tomorrow we are off to Santa Monica to start our trip back east on Route 66!