Updates

Hi! I bet you missed me, didn't you? You being me talking to myself, of course. I'm not crazy, I don't actually think anyone reads this thing. Now I sound like I'm throwing a pity party and I'm really not. The reason I started this blog was to get my travel thoughts in one place and actually written down. If someone actually reads it, I can only hope that there will be something of some use.

So I've been on an extended break. I lost my motivation and found somewhere else to post my ramblings. I had been posting on Trip Advisor, but have since moved on to Yelp. It is definitely fun to post on things that people actually happen across and comment on. Knowing that someone is actually reading your thoughts about something and finding them to be either "cool", "funny" or "helpful" isn't half bad. It doesn't do much but feed my narcissistic side, though. If there's anything we've all learned from the internet, it's that a lot of people have a narcissistic side. As I said, it's nice to know that someone hears you, even if it is shallow and at times seemingly pointless.

Tax season always does different things to me. Usually it gives me motivation to do something . . . who knows what, but something. This time it was the desire to clean and do more sightseeing. The cleaning has spread to all of the bathroom, but maybe that desire will magically reappear at some point. The other desire . . . just getting its steam. I grabbed the boyfriend and forced him into the car last weekend. We even tricked Jason into joining us and went out with a couple stops in mind. The main goal was to go to the Oregon City Elevator, but I had at least one more destination in mind that they weren't as aware of. The elevator was lackluster at best, but the second gave me a renewed desire to chronicle my adventures. I'll post about it in a bit, but Bonnie Lure State Recreation Area is the latest place to get my fingers off the mouse pad and onto the keyboard. There was something about the peaceful creek running up against the pillars of the bridge that reminded me why I love traveling and seeing new things.

Wow, get to the point. The point is that I'm going to try to post some more on here, but I'm focusing my restaurant reviews (and maybe the hotels, we'll see what those are like on Yelp) on Yelp at ralverde.yelp.com. I'll be using this blog to post about everything else. Hopefully I keep up and hopefully something useful comes from it.