Wonderings on Wanderings: Celebrating Five Years of Blogging!

The title of my first post on January 29, 2010 was: “Cruising to a Life Together…of Cruising.” To date, that article has had 12,163 views. At the time, we had been RVing seven months and had traveled from Seattle up to Alaska and the Arctic Circle, down to Mexico and the Tropic of Cancer, and across to Florida. We had also just celebrated our first year wedding anniversary. Yes, we had begun a never-ending honeymoon!

I was just writing to keep a diary until a fellow camper/blogger told me about Entrecard, group of about 40,000 bloggers about 1,000 of them in the travel niche. I joined the site a five months after starting to keep my online diary. Views climbed but plateaued at 5,000 a month. That website is now defunct, taken over by social media engines that have taken the world by storm. Facebook had launched in 2004, followed by Twitter in 2006, and then Google+ in 2007.

By the time I discovered how to use them in January 2013, they were full-blown flourishing engines, patronized by hundreds of millions. Combined, they took my blog to another level. My views began to climb up to the highest recorded of 30,000 a month. I started to take blogging a little more seriously. It has since stabilized to 15,000 views, but my page authority is currently up to 38. My visitors come mostly from the United States, with 263,101 views, followed by France with 40,000, UK with 20,000, Germany with 16,000 and the Philippines with 15,000. 

I write two kinds of posts. Our Lifestyle Adventures or OLAs are articles about our destinations and activities. Wonderings about Wanderings or WOWs are about my thoughts on our travel experiences. I have written about two hundred OLAs and fifty WOWs. Seven OLAs and three WOWs are in my Top 10 most popular posts. Number one with 22,172 views is an OLA, “Turning Wounds into Wisdom” about Georgia, USA, written on November 8, 2011. The favorite WOW post is “Traveling Light, in an RV” with 18,783 views, written on February 4, 2013.

Since we started in June 2009, we have reached forty-nine American states, eight Canadian provinces, and six Mexican states in four cross-continent runs. We have also traveled to countries outside of North America. We have been to three countries in Asia, one in the Caribbean and nine in Europe. We are going to cover more of Europe this year and complete the USA by spending two weeks in Hawaii.

The title of my blog is still “Generation Z. Cruising in an RV.” Although we are technically traveling to places no longer in an RV, we still have not moved to a sticks and bricks home. Our base, where our RV is parked year-round starting 2015, is in Viewpoint RV and Golf Resort in Mesa, Arizona. From there we travel the world and while there, we enjoy the benefits of an RV Resort.

On January 21, 2013, I began to compile my posts, about 166 at the time, into the first draft of my book. We had been RVing for four years and a half. Now, two years later, my book has been completed. It will probably make it to a launch in the last week of May.  It has been six years and a half of traveling, and it seems that the honeymoon has not ended. Most probably, it will when we finally buy our last sticks and bricks home. And then we will be rocking in our chairs, and all my posts will turn into WOWS!