I don't know how professional travel bloggers do it. By the end of my days exploring a new city I'm exhausted and it's really hard for me to even think about summarizing what I experienced for others. And I don't think I even do that much most days. I'm not the sort of traveler that needs to squeeze every once of possibility out of each day. Usually I pick one or two things I really want to do and then I ramble throughout the rest of the day and frankly, strategize around meals. As much of an external processor that I am I need time to sit with my experiences and thoughts in order to be able to honestly reflect on what I did that day and how it compares to other places I've traveled. I have ZERO desire to do a travel blog where I list out the minutia of traveling between cities and navigating must do hot spots in each place. I admire people who can do that because I think those types of blogs help future travelers immensely. I don't have the brain for holding those details and as much as this is challenging for me to carve out time to do and for me to consider what I think is worth writing about, I think writing a more information-based blog in the style of a guide book would feel so incredibly tedious. I'd have absolutely no motivation to do that any day of the week.
It's not as easy for to me to write a somewhat detailed reflection on this page as it is for me to post a photo on Instagram and write a quick blurb that may or may not express much of anything. I think it's worth it for me to do this though, even if few people read it. I don't keep a journal regularly, but this blog gives me the chance to do what I think a lot of people do with their personal journals - I can go back and relive these moments later with some details that I've forgotten about over time. I've actually already done it a couple times on this trip looking back at some things from Vietnam and South America. I find myself often reading with a big goofy grin on my face because I am flooded with memories of feelings, not just memories of what I saw and did. Plus, how am I supposed to summarize these eight months when I go back and inevitably asked, "so how was it??" There's going to be no way to succinctly answer that. At least I can give a short answer and then say, "If you really want to know more we can either have a longer chat or I can just pass this blog link along to you." LOL Even as I write that, that seems pretentious as fuck. LOL I can't imagine actually saying that to someone, but it would provide a better perspective on how everything way instead of a summary of everything together.
I'm rambling a bit because I'm tired, but my point is that I think this is worth it, but it's wicked hard to make myself sit down at night and knock out a post. It's even harder to get myself up early to do it in the morning instead. I fully recognize that I still haven't finished posting about Sydney. I am trying to wrap my head around how I can possibly summarize the magic of the 14 days of the Australian Open. And time hasn't stopped so I've been in Kuala Lumpur for two days already, have one more full day, and then I'm off to Bangkok. I thought I'd be a little more on top of it, but it is what it is.
One aspect of doing this that I critically underestimated was the time it takes me to organize my photos. According to my Iphone I have 1,415 photos and videos from this trip currently on my phone. Those are the ones I haven't written anything about. I have already deleted some off after I transferred them to my external hard drive and to Google Photos. I'm really proud of myself because unlike with other trips I've taken I'm labeling each photo and organizing them systematically before I transfer them over. This means that I don't have to go back and do it later and I'm doing it while it's fresh in my head. I can tell you that I definitely didn't do this with most of my other photos. I didn't do it at all with ANY of my photos from South America three years ago and that's a major problem because I can't even find many of them. I think I know where they are, but I'm going to have to work to organize them. Hopefully I can remember where most were taken. Some will have been automatically labeled from my Iphone, but I took a lot on a digital camera that didn't GPS label the photo location. That organization is part of a personal project for this sabbatical once I'm a little more settled and not acting like a tourist constantly.
I don't really know how to end this post, and as I've been writing I've been thinking about how for every trip I've blogged about there's probably been a post like this one - a "here's why I haven't posted in a while and why I'm so behind." I know that I've had some trips where I haven't even finished posting about the trip at all. I got so far behind that when I got back to the states I just stopped. My plan is to keep working on it, but for now it is what it is.
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