I spent much of the weekend updating and transitioning the Treasured Places website from wordpress back to html.
I made lots of improvements, most notably a filtering mechanism for the list of objectives. Still a few more things to improve, but a solid upgrade.
I’ll re-complete this quest soon!
I’m excited to mark off these 6 unvisited counties on my upcoming trip—wrapping up California and teeing up both Oregon and Washington for completion.
My initial county quest goal was 100% of the West + 50% done in every state, and I’m probably only 30 counties and 4 easy trips from that goal.
No questions please.
I’m finally returning to Olympic National Park during our upcoming road trip. My only visit was back in 2003 and I absolutely loved it. So much so that I hand-coded a dedicated html website to show off our trip photos to friends (the partial site renderings are courtesy of wayback machine, which only sorta archived it). That site would eventually expand to a few national park trips before I eventually moved it all over to scottspics.com, which ran on a php photo gallery.
By 2005, I was primarily posting to Flickr first—which featured a great community of fellow roadtrippers—and uploads to my own sites started to taper down a bit. Eventually, I was nearly exclusively sharing to facebook and twitter. That’s too bad, as the fragmentation meant that I’ve never had a single library of all my trips. I’d eventually like to change that.
I figured I’d test out a new micro.blog crossposting feature with ten shots from our Norway trip earlier this summer.
“We could have never known how much this trip would change our lives."
—from Out There: A National Parks Story (which debuts online on Aug 22)
Oh man, I know how that feels! I felt the same way when I visited 100 National Parks in 100 Days to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the National Park Service (sorta accidentally).
Here’s more about the film:
In the centennial year of the U.S. National Park Service, a young filmmaker and his childhood friend set off on a 10,000-mile journey through America’s national parks, leaving home with little more than a camera and a desire to understand what draws people to these wild places. What begins as a summer road trip evolves into a stunning journey of discovery, uncovering the stories of those who protect, visit, and find meaning in the parks.
Along the way, they meet rangers, conservationists, and everyday visitors whose lives have been shaped by these places. Through intimate interviews, sweeping cinematography, and a moving original score, Out There weaves their stories into a portrait of the national parks as more than extraordinary landscapes, but as places of healing, reflection, resilience, and connection across generations and cultures.
Both a cinematic tribute and a grassroots love letter to America’s public lands, Out There explores what it means to find belonging in the natural world, and the enduring power of these shared places to bring us closer to the land, to one another, and to ourselves.
Have a personalized license plate?
In some states, if your personalized plate is stolen, you can’t get the same one as a replacement—you’ve lost it forever. So to make mine just a bit harder to steal, I changed out the license plate screws for security screws that require a matching tool to remove.
When there’s a broken sprinkler at your local brewery, you build a sailboat.
Roar
Also good to see that the Wavelength ios app (for micro.blog) got an update. I’ve been considering recording some audio posts (distributed as a podcast on rsjon.es) for quite some time. Wavelength might be the app that makes it happen.
Fun to see a new Micro Monday newsletter today! Also fun that photo posts from both Jen and I were included.
And, of course, I’m all in on their post prompt 😉:
🌲 August 25 National Park Service Birthday The National Park Service turns 110 this year.
Show us a favorite national park, state park or trail. We want to know about the places you return to whenever you need to get outside.
We’ve shifted our upcoming camping trip from Banff/Jasper to the PNW instead. We’ll tackle a number of quest items—including re-completing the Treasured Places quest—and revisit Yosemite, Olympic, Mt Rainier, & Bryce Canyon. Excited for OLYM/MORA, as it’s been 20+ yrs since my last visit! 🙈
Welp, that didn’t take long…
Hello again old friend.
Bummer to hear that EchoFeed is shutting down. I’ve always been happy with Micro.blog’s rss cross posting, but it was a great option for others.
(If you’re seeing this one Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, my posts all originate from rsjon.es and are automagically copied to those platforms).
In 2021, I got the chance to meet up with Charles McCool for a beer or two or three (with wife Julie joining a bit later). I didn’t interact with Charles frequently online, but had always felt like we were kindred spirits nonetheless.
I had good reason to feel that way. Our conversation that day lasted much longer than expected and touched deeply into our shared life philosophies. It easily ranked among my most favorite meetups—and that’s a tremendous compliment.
So I was absolutely stunned when I learned of his unexpected passing this spring. Today is his birthday, and I wanted to pay a moment of respect to one helluva cool dude. Thank you Charles for inspiring countless people to travel. I’m raising a pint in your honor today.
I’m usually frustrated when people wander right out into a shot I’m trying to take, but it seemed to work out just fine in this case.
Crazy to see that, since 2024, I’ve been to exactly 1043 US counties, which is a full 33% of the US. Of those, 630 of those have been my first visit to that county, exactly 1/5th of the US. Wow! 🤯🤯🤯
Updated some of my travel quests after our recent trips:
- 50 Countries by Age 50 (now 63/100)
- Drink a Guinness in an Irish Pub in 32 Countries (66%)
- 100 UNESCO World Heritage Sites (61%)
- UNESCO World Heritage Site in 50 Countries (60%)
- National Parks in 50 Countries (38%)
- US Counties (79%)
I was constantly on the lookout for beer cheese soup during our last road trip, finding only a single mediocre bowl at a brewery. So my wife did some digging and found the only spot in Phoenix that seems to be serving it and surprised me with lunch out today.
