I still publish five blogs.  I have not touched this travel blog for more than a year.  I used this blog as a historic reference in Dave’s Weather Blog, to weather events that have persisted more than a year.  Tornadoes and flooding rainstorms that began on our road trip to Branson, MO, and nearby Arkansas, got really wild on the road between Little Rock and Blytheville in April 2010.  We  missed the same pattern by a matter of days on our Spring 2011 trip.  Damage already was happening near Roanoke, VA., while we visited Charlottesville and Monticello to the north.  Not long after this year’s trip, Joplin, MO was destroyed, too close to friends and relatives in Missouri and Arkansas.  The pattern persists  as I write in July 2011.

This year’s spring road trip deserves several blog posts.  This first entry already is a memory exercise that fits another theme, “Pictures of My Mind”, a memoir story that will take me a year to draft.  Photographic memories are in fact an important exercise I practiced  in a writing course I took this spring, “Memories, Myths, and Dreams”.  Follow the sidebar link to my Taurus Id blog (partlydave.blogspot.com) to read  posts that will appear in my memoir stories.  Read those posts back to January 2011.

Do you use flash memory devices?  We call ours memory sticks.  Many of the photo albums from our spring 2011 trip went to Facebook while we were travelling. Just today I found the complete set of albums on a memory stick that has no label on it.  Those photos do not carry the captions and comments that appear in my Facebook albums.

Have you been invited to use Google+ ?  One reason you might use Google+ is to link to  a “cloud” called Picasa Web Albums.  To use Picasa, you also must have Picasa3 software on your pc.  That is a good thing for tracking what you have and do not have stored on your pc, as well as the means to upload new photos.  I think Google+ may be a struggle for those already using Flickr with Yahoo.  I am much more familiar with Facebook, and can see why they are miles ahead of Google and Yahoo in both social networking and photo sharing.  Familiarity with the tools requires constant use, else memory loss due to normal aging makes the multiple platforms (Google, Yahoo, Facebook) difficult to manage.  I use them all. I ignore Twitter, except to keep up with friends who prefer it.

Our D.C., Williamsburg, Monticello stories encompass a full range of historical memories, including our own history over the past forty years.  Many more threads come out of that trip, including a brief trial of Ancestry.com.  My wife and my daughter may be able to prove they are DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution).  Put more than two and two together from what we heard from excellent tour guides and other historians.  We have become experts in our own minds, after ten years experience as historians and tour guides working for the Minnesota Historical Society.  We prove the case in conversation with some of the best guides we’ve ever met on our Spring 2011 road trip.

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