I’m set up at Mythical Coffee in Gilbert, Arizona, for a morning of writing. Thirty-eight miles from home at a place that’s new to me happens as Caroline is over in Mesa for a three-day workshop. This past week has seen her frantically winding a warp and dressing her loom so she could be out this way early to hang out with about 15 other weavers and engage in learning something or other about weaving.

For me, this is a break from a part of my routine as I’m out of my neighborhood, trying a new coffee, and for the few minutes, I work on this blog entry I’m not exploring the past. What I mean by this is that if you look at the handwritten notes on the left, they are from 13 years ago when Caroline and I were on a 16-day road trip along the East Coast. In the ongoing effort to rid ourselves of the physical stuff we really don’t need to drag forward, I’ve been digitizing, scanning, or transcribing these things into the digital realm.

Over the years Caroline or I would keep notes about some of our travels, I cannot say what the criteria were that we would or wouldn’t write things down but I wish we’d journaled our thoughts on every trip we made. Working from these often cryptic fragments, a selection of photos we’d taken, the itinerary on a spreadsheet if I find it on my hard drive, and the help of Google Maps I’m mostly able to flesh out a considerable amount of detail that brings our adventure back to clarity.

This exercise also allows some of the 174,639 photos we’ve taken to escape digital purgatory where bits hidden on a computer may or may not exist if they are never seen. While thrusting them into the light of the WordPress page I concede that they’ll still remain mostly hidden as I don’t honestly expect anyone to go back to May 14, 2007, on my blog to read about our day at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. For Caroline and I, we now have an encapsulation of that particular day that reduces the images from 125 photos on my computer to 19 photos that highlight what we did with 1,112 words that tell us a story from out of our own lives.

The importance for me about this is not some dumb idea where others think this is a window allowing us to live in the past nor is it a tool for us to find nostalgia in something that would ever be considered the “Good Old Days” unless we are in the late stages of life and are unable to venture out anymore. It is the mechanism to align our memories with reality so how we’d like to remember something isn’t allowed to skew the truth. In the course of our travels, we needn’t candy-coat events as we genuinely enjoy the unfolding of things and relish our experiences with astonishment that we were so lucky to have been present in the face of novelty.

I estimate that I’ll need a couple of months yet to finish the remaining notes that cover roughly half a dozen vacations. I might also have some digital notes that are hanging out somewhere buried in the depths of directories filled with schedules and various musings that need review.

A wonderful side effect of this effort is finding most all of the memories alive and well still in our heads though I have to give it to Caroline for having a mole burrow mind where the smallest of details emerge after the larger trigger brings her back into any particular day of our travels.