There are nearly three weeks between my last post and taking the time to sit down for some small talk with myself: the gravity of change that comes with traveling needed a longer moment to settle. That part of me thriving in constant stimulation must allow expectation to fade as I return to a routine and a culture from which I feel increasingly alienated. But this is my life at this time in Phoenix, Arizona, one of bearing witness to the mendacity of a population trying to buy happiness.

Well, the fact of the matter is, I really never stopped writing as I have three documents on my desktop representing some 2,400 words of observations that linger in the realm of uncertainty, meaning that maybe they find their way to the blog, and maybe they don’t. Not that this was all I wrote, but I was also busy dragging some ancient memories out in the writing about Caroline’s adventure at Yarn School in Harveyville, Kansas, back in September 2007. That was triggered by my ongoing attempt to account for every travel day Caroline and I’ve taken since the advent of consumer digital photography.

If you look to the right column of this blog (or near the bottom if you are viewing this on a smartphone), you will see a block with the heading “Other Pages.” At the top of that section is a link to a page titled “Travels In The Digital Age” which is my attempt to eat all of your bandwidth; just kidding. Seriously though, as of today, there are 540 records (images and links) that track our adventures away from home, starting at 9.9.99. I found our oldest digital image, and from there, I’ve tried posting a photo from each day out on the road. So far, I’ve caught up to October 1, 2007. During that time, it appears we were traveling on average 67 days per year, which seems like a lot of vacation, but more precisely, we vacationed 5½ days per month, which doesn’t sound like that much. Ultimately, I think I’ll be adding about another 1,000 images before I catch up to where we are today, but at that time, I’ll probably never recommend someone clicking the link because it will download hundreds of megabytes in imagery. And that moment won’t be very soon as I’m nearly two solid years into trying to bring this effort together.

What’s taking so long to assemble this massive post? As I move from year to year, ensuring I’ve grabbed at least one image from every day we were traveling, I stumble into trips that have never been documented, so I review the photos and try to write something to those. In other cases, I posted only one photo of a trip as bandwidth limitations in those days wouldn’t support the posting of 30 of my favorite images from the 200 – 500 I could shoot in a day. So those posts get updated too, and, luckily, Caroline hunted through a bunch of our old notebooks, discovering travel diaries that came in super handy in fleshing out some of our forgotten stories.

While we were in Germany, I hit a new milestone: 1,500,000 words published here at JohnWise.com. Back in July 2020, I wrote that I’d shared a little more than 1.1 million words, so having written nearly 400,000 between then and now, I’m pretty happy. What does this number mean? Really, nothing at all, though it is a good metric assuring me that I’ve been diligent in exercising my nascent skills. Sadly, my next bragging milestone requires a half-million more words to be written, so after a bit more than another year out, I’ll be posting an entry with the simple title: Two Million.

But does any of this answer “Where I’ve been?” No, it goes into some small details of what I’ve been doing, and the snarky answer of where I’ve been could simply be stated as I’ve been in the milieu. This has become a question that is stymying me as I scan the last couple of weeks trying to discover if there’s been an overarching theme tracing through my mind, and, other than generalized malaise, I can’t put a finger on anything particular. Yet, I have this nagging feeling that just beyond my conscious view there is something preoccupying me and that if I just posed the question of where I’ve been to myself, I’d ponder and then answer this. Nope, not coming up with anything, so I must have been nowhere.