EVERY now and again I am in need of reminding myself 'why I continue to write this blog?'
Occasionally someone either emails me or I meet and am asked why I don't have more supporters.
It's been suggested to me that I could have a lot more 'views' and thousands more readers if I were to allow advertisements on the blog and commercialize it, you know dress it up with fancy stuff and flashy graphics and maybe even do a U Tube thing.
I will attempt to clarify this.
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| Divvie in Italy |
Back in the years just after the last ice age (it seems) I was riding around in old / New Europe. I had planned doing that since I ordered my 1973 BMW R60/5 from Alberta Cycle at age 18 on the European delivery plan. Which btw was thwarted by my brother in law and father, putting me to work right after high school. I was informed (chuckle) that I was going to apprentice as a machinist starting the day after I closed my books.
What I wanted was to ride long distances and of course having been born in Hungary in the mid fifties, I felt a pull to return. You see, our family left the country along with 249,996 other Hungarians shortly after the death of the biggest mass murderer in history, *Uncle Joe Stalin, the (real) man of steel! We left the country as the Russians pulled in, sparking a major uprising, some would call it a revolution, followed by plenty of Molotov cocktails and shooting at anything with a red star.
Unfortunately all that was quickly overshadowed days later as the Suez Canal seizure took place.
*Now some have argued that Genghis Khan held the number one spot but I really don't think there was 60-70 million people on the planet back then. I'm sure if the Mongols had more people, tanks and MG 42's, their numbers would have been inflated as well.
A n y w a y...
I digress, but you see I am allowed because this is my Blog.
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| The Citicom 300i in summer lupins |
Okay... so I bought a very pretty Yamaha 1993 XJ 600... what we called the Seca II after the famous California racetrack and over the pond, they knew it as the Diversion. I bought the Diversion that I called "Little Red" and was riding it over two seasons to places like Istrea, the various mountain ranges, Elba (do I need to explain the significance of that Island?) the Brandenburg gate, Budapest and Athens... drinking Americano coffee and pretty much doing what I wanted to. Which is important to me.
Being pre, what I like to affectionately call, the "Smarterthani" phone era, I found myself holing up at some Alpine hotel or Spanish hostale or some French B&B, trying to send an email on a keyboard based on a language I didn't know. Or the keyboard would be damaged, or it didn't want to load my photos. The tipping point was A Rua Spain when I found a bar down the main street and trying to decipher a key board that was missing keys and doing my best to get a few pictures added, while costing me about 5 Euro's per hour, three quarters of which was wasted, Holly suggest that instead of me writing 20 emails and trying to upload pictures of different things, places, sights etc... she says...
"Dad, why don't you just do a blog?"
Now I had heard of blogs but the mechanics of it was beyond me, she says "I'll set it up for you..." and I began this Blog.
From the beginning it was a far better way to communicate with people back home and those I was meeting abroad. All I had to do was plug in my camera (remember them?) download some photos onto the Blog and presto... I just saved myself hours of frustration and keyboarding!
I could sit down at the hotel in the French Alps, or at an internet cafe in Portugal and in a much shortened time frame, inform my friends and family where I was, what I was doing and that I was still alive (many thought I wouldn't make it) and after tapping out a blog... I could reward myself with a local dinner and a cold beer.
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| The Rocky Mountains, a fitting backdrop for a big bore single |
From those days, I have written over 600 posts, loaded thousands of photographs and had over 60,000 views. Sixty three thousand and thirty two in fact, and counting. Some people rely on my keeping this up to get their jollies and because I have resisted commercializing it I can say what I want as I want it and sometimes even beat my drum while standing atop my soap box.
To be perfectly honest, I couldn't care less about the thousands of topics that are blogged every day.
I'm happy when I see viewers from France, Italy the U.K. Germany, the USA and even Russia. I love getting comments but couldn't care less if I didn't.
If the video technology had come out sooner, I'd be Vlogging no doubt. At 63 years of age having been carried from the country of my birth in a potato sack in the dead of night*, to say nothing of my satisfaction in riding motorcycles since 1968 and having had the opportunity to be a father, a racer, and now a grandfather, spent time in Baja, and more recently Arizona, and living once again on a lovely little jewel of an Island and yes having overheard a tourist one day in a local restaurant ask the server if PEI, having a bridge connecting it to New Brunswick, was still an Island?
For those of you that like reading my drivel... thanks and keep doing it.
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