The Camping Machine rolls into Moab

For those of you who have never been to Moab, Utah – and I suspect that is most of you – this post will give you a sense of a very unique place.

As a TV News Cameraman I first went to Moab in the late 1980s. Moab is located is the southeastern part of Utah, close to the Colorado River, in a pretty valley bordered by stunning red sandstone cliffs. For many years Moab was a sleepy, rural small town in the middle of nowhere until a uranium boom put it on the map in the 1950’s. The boom was followed by the inevitable bust, and the town languished. Those who stayed enjoyed beautiful views, a slower pace of life, and a mild influx of tourist dollars from people who wanted to see two of the most beautiful and under-appreciated places in America – Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park.

When I first went there I thought it was just another wide spot on a rural road to nowhere, a place to gas up and continue your journey to your final destination. I’ve seen dozens of those and they all looked the same to me. After visiting Arches NP and taking a couple of off-road jeep tours I came to appreciate the special qualities of this part of the state. I soon found myself coming to Moab, a four-hour trip, for weekends of bike riding, four-wheeling and photography. I came to love the stark beauty of the red cliffs and unique landscape in this part of the country. The Colorado plateau is stark, stunning and severe – it is also spiritual and special to those who can appreciate it.

Today Moab is approaching places like Park City and Sedona as hip and chic places to hang out, shop, enjoy arts and the outdoors. Moab draws a different crowd – younger, less affluent, more inclined to go for a bike ride, off-road adventure or river run than play golf or rub elbows with celebrities – but the atmosphere is similar. The main street in Moab has an eclectic mix of bookstores, café’s, curio shops, galleries and restaurants (as well as the ubiquitous franchise outlets), so there is plenty do see and do for those who don’t want to or can’t enjoy the opportunities to hike, bike, and explore.

This is the place we took our family for Memorial Day Weekend in The Camping Machine. The boys were very excited to get out for our first camping adventure of the season. We left early Friday morning to beat the inevitable exodus from our city that was to follow later in the day. Where we live it is common to see the freeways out of town fill up with RVs and other recreational vehicles beginning shortly after noon every Friday. It begins even sooner when a Holiday weekend approaches. When I was single I would see these vehicles leave town and wonder where the campers and RVs were going. In my mind they were all going to fun and exciting places, getting away from the city for a breath of fresh air at the lake, in the mountains or on the desert. I hoped that someday I’d be one of them, heading on the highway, looking for adventure or whatever came my way.

Today we were one of them, proud members of the RV Nation. Destination: Moab.

We had beautiful weather as we pulled The Camping Machine into Moab and our campsite at the Moab Valley RV Park. We set up the campsite, hooked up the utilities and organized the living space before packing the boys off to the pool for a swim. It seems strange to come all the way to Moab to swim in a small campground pool, but when you travel with kids ages 7 and 5 swimming is what they like to do. The water was extremely cold – I don’t know how the boys could stay in so long, but they had a great time as MBW and I froze. We were icicles by the time the boys were ready to get out.

We grilled brats and hot dogs for dinner, made s’mores for dessert, played life-size checkers and mini-golf at the campground playground and went to bed.

The next day we went into Arches National Park. Arches has the largest concentration of natural stone arches anywhere in the world. Delicate Arch is the unofficial symbol of the state of Utah and is featured on one version of the state’s license plates. The park draws tourists from all over the world, and we happened to enter the park just ahead of a busload of tourists from Germany. When we got out at one of the first major scenic areas we were nearly trampled by German-speaking men and women racing to get photos of each other in front of one of the larger arches in the park. MBW said, “What’s their hurry? It’s not like it’s going anywhere.”

She has a point.

The highlight for the boys was Sand Dune Arch. This particular feature is an arch hidden between two massive sandstone walls, or ‘fins.’ Because it is virtually enclosed between two towering walls, the sand created by the wind and rain eroding the sandstone rock features has gathered at the base of this arch, creating a giant sandbox. It is a perfect place to bring two boys and their sand toys to sit and play amid the splendor of nature. Much as I’d like to say we were the only ones to think of this idea, we weren’t. So many families decided to do the same thing it prompted one visitor to say, “This looks like the National Park Service day care center.”

After a picnic lunch in the park we went back to the campsite, changed clothes and went into Moab. It turns out Memorial Day weekend is when Moab holds the annual Moab Arts Festival. While this arts festival is nothing like the Park City Arts Festival, the Sun Valley Arts Festival or the Jackson Hole Arts Festival, it did feature live music, some interesting characters and some interesting art. MBW bought a silver bracelet. I took pictures.

Sunday we went south to the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. We made a stop at Newspaper Rock State Historical Site, a large rock panel covered with Native American petroglyphs. This is one of the largest and best-preserved rock art panels in the United States. The artwork is thought to be a combination of Anasazi, Fremont and Navajo images. No one knows for sure what the images mean or what stories are told here, but it is thought that it was a way to communicate with others passing through the area.

After leaving Newspaper Rock we entered Canyonlands National Park. This is one of the more remote and least-visited National Parks in the United States. It features beautiful, stark vistas of sandstone rock formations and more Native American rock art and structures. We explored a cave that had been a temporary dwelling place for Native Americans and, later, cowboys who passed through the area. The boys thought it was very cool to stand in a cave where ‘Indians’ and Cowboys once stood. Despite the hot, dry desert conditions the area features beautiful and abundant plant life uniquely suited to the harsh desert climate.

By the end of the day we were all hot and tired. It was early to bed for the Camping Machine family, and come Monday morning it was time to go home. Breaking camp is one of my least favorite activities, as it means it’s time to go home. But we had a wonderful trip and it makes my day when, as we’re pulling out of the campsite, my son says, “That was so much fun! Let’s come back here again!”

We will. You can count on it.

For more on this trip, including more photos, please visit The Camping Machine website sometime over the weekend. It will take me a bit longer to upload the photos I took and the blog entry will be expanded on that site.

It’s Great to be The Family Man with The Camping Machine.

Made it to Moab!

We arrived safely in Moab and are settled in the campground. Boys having a great time. Internet access is very slow. May not be able to post photos until we get home. Will post some here and more on The Camping Machine website.

Time to go camping!

With two days to departure we are preparing for our first camping trip of the year. As this website is pretty new and this blog has been dormant for months, I thought I would share with you the post I wrote two years ago that describes how we came to own The Camping Machine. Here is the post:

It started in February 2004. It was a cold, snowy weekend and we were looking for something to do with the kids. My wife had been talking to one of her friends earlier in the day, and this friend happened to mention they were going to the RV show. My wife said, “Maybe that would be something to do this afternoon.”

So we loaded up the truck and went to see RVs. 5th wheels, Motor Homes.

Chris and Tommy loved it. When we walked through the door into the convention center Chris stopped dead in his tracks and said, “Look at all these Camping Machines!”

Thus the name was born. We spend a couple of hours there that day, and over the course of that time I thought maybe this would be a fun way for our family to spend time together – get one of these ‘camping machines’ and explore our part of the country. After all, we live in a place with fantastic access to mountains, lakes and National Parks within a day’s drive. What better way to spend quality time as a family, away from the city, TV, video games and the normal routine?

I spend the next year doing research on RVs, tow vehicles, and the whole camping lifestyle. The more my wife and I talked about it the more we thought it would be fun to give it a try. I spend hundreds of hours online (rv.net is a great resource) looking at trailer specs, reading message boards and asking questions. It took some time but I started to understand what would be a good fit four our family, our travel plans and our budget.

This past February we went back to the RV show. Three times in two days. We narrowed our selections to four models. The week after the show I went to the dealers and looked at each one more carefully. Two weeks later we ordered the one we liked best from the factory.

Today we picked it up and drove it home.

Our two boys couldn’t be more excited. We ate lunch in the Camping Machine – in the driveway. We ate dinner in the Camping Machine. In the driveway. And right now they are both sleeping in the Camping Machine. In the driveway.

And I’m writing this in the Camping Machine. IN the driveway. Before I, too, will go to sleep in the Camping Machine. In the driveway.

My wife is in bed already. In the house.

Maybe next weekend we’ll go camping.


Well, we did go camping that weekend. The first year we only got out three more times, but last year we got out seven times. Not bad considering we also had youth soccer, T-ball and other family obligations. Plus, here in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, our season is short – basically Memorial Day to Labor Day.


It’s interesting how we came to be a Camping Family. As a boy I did not go camping with my family. We just didn’t do that. My wife did not go camping with her family when she was a child. We don’t have many friends who are serious campers. So the whole thing was very new to us.


But because we live in such a beautiful area with virtually endless possibilities for outdoor recreation, and because my wife and I are committed to spending more quality time with our kids doing things outdoors and less time in front of the TV, we looked into the whole RV/Camping thing as a way to honor our commitment.

Even more than that, I want to make sure we make the most of our time together while our children are young and live with us. It is hard for me to believe my boys will turn 7 and 5 this summer! Where did those seven years go? I am afraid the time will fly by and before we know it, the boys will be off to college. So our investment in our travel trailer, or rather our Camping Machine, is to make sure we get out and do things together. Get out on the road and see places outside of our back yard. Make those memories as a family so that when our kids look back on their childhood they say to themselves, “We sure did a lot of fun things when we were kids.”

So there it is, the context for this website and this blog. It’s not about the Camping Machine. It’s about our family and what we do together. The Camping Machine is one way, a fun way, for us to grow together as a family, see new places, have fun and spend time in the great outdoors. Plus, in my humble opinion, it makes an interesting hook to the website – I am a marketing guy, after all.


I hope you’ll check in when you can for updates and dispatches from the road. Please feel free to leave your comments. Thanks again for reading! And, if I can plug it one more time, please visit The Camping Machine website.

It's great to be The Family Man (especially when we're going camping!)

Shop 'til you drop

Last weekend was a Major Shopping Event for me. Now many of you might find a Major Shopping Weekend a very exciting thing, and I might too, if I were shopping for home electronics, books, or camping equipment. But alas, this weekend was one of those ‘have to do it, can’t put it off any longer, let’s get this over as quickly as possible’ Shopping Events

I had to buy new eyeglasses and new dress shoes.

To set (or re-set, since I’ve been one so long) the scene, I do wear eyeglasses. I am nearsighted, have been since second grade. I have worn contacts in the past but for the past several years I’ve stuck with the glasses. I would have kept the glasses I’ve had for the past three years, except they broke in half last week and my backup pair is so old the prescription had gone out of date. They gave me a headache when I wore them.

My dress shoes are even older than my glasses were. There were holes in the soles. When the parking lot was wet my socks would get damp. That really didn’t bother me – it doesn’t rain that much here, and I like wasting money on new shoes about as much as I like flushing $100 bills down the toilet. I was willing to keep the shoes for a few more months, at lest until winter set in. But when I told my wife I was going to go choose new frames and get a decent, current pair of glasses, she insisted on coming along. “And you’re getting new shoes,” she said. “That’s that.”

So off we went to the mall.

Of course it was a beautiful day, the type of day it should be criminal to be inside a shopping mall. I mean, really, the Activity Police should be at every entrance of the mall issuing citations for Unconscionable Waste of Sunshine to everyone going in. But no such luck today. With MBW leading the charge I mope my way inside.

To the franchise Eyeglasses outlet we go. The manager, young enough to be my son, was very helpful. He showed us several frames that were, in turn, “Edgy, Hip, and very Mod." After hearing these descriptions I said to him, “You are very nice and helpful. But I’m 46 years old. I’m getting gray hair. There’s nothing edgy, hip or very mod about me. I just want to see clearly and not look like a dork. Do you have a section for guys like me?”

He looked at me and said “You don’t look a day over 40!”

I said, “Do you work on commission?”

After some further searching we landed on a pair of frames that, with the correct lenses,will allow me to see clearly. I can’t tell you if they look good, and frankly I don’t really care. At this point in my life I’ll settle for not looking bad. They said the glasses would be ready in about an hour. We said we’d come back then to pick them up.

As we left the store MBW said, “Now let’s go get your new shoes!”

I turned back to the manager and said, “See you next weekend!”

That earned me a sharp elbow to the ribs.

This is where MBW is in her element. Shoes. Preferably women’s shoes, of course, but really any shoes will do. She pored over the displays. She knew all the brands. After what seemed like months of consideration, she selected half-a-dozen styles for me to try on.

The poor sales associate needed a dolly to wheel all the shoes out of the back room.

After I tried on the first pair and took a few steps I said to the clerk, “These will do just fine. Box them up and charge my card.” MBW simply glowered at me and favored me with another sharp elbow to the ribs.

45 minutes later I had dutifully tried on each of the selected pairs of shoes, some twice. We settled on a pair of black dress shoes that she liked, and fortunately for me did not hurt my feet too badly. By the time we went back to pick up my glasses and leave the mall I expected it to be next week, or certainly well after dark. But what seemed like a weekend stay in the county jail was really only about two hours of agony.

So today I go into work with my new glasses and shoes. The first thing MBW says to me when I walk in the door at the end of the day is, “Did anyone notice your shoes?”

“No,” I say.

“Did anyone comment on your new glasses?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you feel bad?”

I wanted to laugh.

Instead, I said, “I’ll get over it.” She gave me a hug, and then I said, “The best part is these new glasses allow me to see how truly beautiful you are. I am the luckiest guy in the world to have such a beautiful wife.”

What happened next made the pain and suffering at the mall all worthwhile.

It’s Great to be The Family Man.

Now I've done it...

I've been messing around with my template (can you tell?) and I have lost all of my links.

Please be patient while I hunt them all down again...

Thanks,
TCM by TFM

Web.com stinks

Some of you may have had this experience, but if you have not, be aware of this.

As I mentioned earler this week I have built a website and wanted to incorporate this blog into it. I am an internet neophyte and used Web.com to build my site. Overall the experience was pretty good. If you have visited my site you can see it is clearly the work of an amateur, but it is coming along and I learn something new each time I play around with it.

The latest attempt was to have my blog display in one of the pages on the new site. According to Blogger you can do this. . Beth was kind enough to send me an email with the specific Blogger instructions on how to do this.

So this evening I tried to do it, following Beth's instructions exactly, and it did not work.

I tried several times, to no avail.

I called the Web.com customer support line, and have just gotten off the phone with them after almost 45 minutes. The net of it is, I cannot display my Blogger blog on a page in my website.

So now I have to either figure out how to build teh site in Dreamweaver, which I own but don't have the first clue how to use, or transfer my site to some other host, change templates and start all over.

It's a bit of a bummer.

Any thoughts?

Wow!

Guess I need to reduce the size of the photo onthe new header....

What's up with The Camping Machine?

If you read my last post you know that I have launched a new website called The Camping Machine. Long-time readers of this blog (most of whom have stopped reading as I have all but stopped posting) may remember this post and this one where I mentioned our travel trailer and the camping trips we have taken. Our family has had fun the past two years visiting national and state parks and doing the whole trailer camping thing. We enjoy spending time outdoors and seeing new places. The boys in particular really get excited as we prepare for each trip, and MBW and I believe this is a great way for us to spend time together as a family.

As a blogger I am drawn to the idea of communicating my thoughts and ideas with others. I like the idea of putting my posts out there, knowing that people are reading my words or looking at my photos and occasionally providing feedback (or pushback) on my views. I do check the stats on the blog to see how many people are reading and I get satisfaction when the numbers are trending up.

I consider myself a creative person – by nature, by schooling and by vocation. The Family Man blog has been a great creative outlet. I’ve enjoyed it and have learned a great deal about myself, my family and the people who have read my posts. But as you may have discerned, my passion for it has waned as I’ve felt limited by the format and, to an extent, the theme. This may be because I don’t know html at all and really couldn’t figure out how to customize the blog page to add any character. And while I realize the attraction for the readers is the content, not the packaging, I still felt constrained.

While making our annual summer trips towing The Camping Machine we have spent time on rural two-lane roads. At any significant hill our speed drops well below the posted limit, and the line of cars stacked up behind us grows quickly. Being the conscientious person that I am, I try to use pullouts, passing lanes or other opportunities to let those unencumbered with trailers to pass us. Often, however, someone will spend a long time behind our trailer, staring at the back end.

As a marketer by trade (I work in an advertising agency) I thought it would be interesting to build a website and see what kind of traffic I could generate by having the website url on the back bumper of the trailer. The fact that I don’t have a website to promote really didn’t enter my mind as I pondered the idea. I thought about putting the url for this blog on the back, but that didn’t really excite me. So I thought about it off and on over the winter as The Camping Machine sat on the RV pad next to our house, snug under its cover.

One day on a lark I went to one of those website domain search sites and typed in thecampingmachine.com, and lo and behold the url was available. I went ahead and bought it, not really knowing what, if anything, I would ever do with it. Over the next few weeks I tried to figure out how to put up a site. A year ago I had purchased Dreamweaver and put it on my compute, but I never made the time to learn how to use it. After the first couple of weeks I let it go and moved on to something else – like writing the science fiction novel.

As camping season drew closer I thought again about building a website and promoting it on the back of our rig. I went to Web.com and bought one of those ‘web-site-in-a-box’ solutions that promised an easy, step-by-step solution to building a website. Choosing from far too many templates I started work on it, and if you go here you’ll see the progress (or lack thereof) I’ve made. The solution is almost as simple as advertised, and although it does seem to have limitations there is quite a bit a novice like me can do with it.

Getting back to the original question, my thought for the site was to provide a larger frame for the blog. I still intend to write about the usual topics, but I’ll focus a bit more on the camping aspect during the summer and perhaps do more entries around where we go and what we see. I’ll be able to show more photography, another creative outlet of mine, and perhaps some of you will find that interesting. And I want to test my original hypothesis, which is that a captive audience can be motivated to action if they are exposed to a message long enough. I will be interested to see how many visitors the site gets once we get out on the road and start blocking traffic.

For those of you who aren’t campers, I will tell you the people you meet at campgrounds are by and large very nice folks. Many of them love to stroll over to the campers in the next site and visit about their rigs, where they’ve been and what they like to do on the road. I expect that some of them will see the url on the rig while it is parked in the campground and check out our site from the comfort of their oversized, overpriced luxury motor homes using the wireless internet connection provided by the KOA. I would not be surprised if some of their stories make in into the blog – in fact, I see this as a rich source of content that could provide for some very amusing tales.

One thing I was surprised to find was the lack of blogs from people who do the camping thing regularly. As I was assembling links for the Links page of the website I wanted to link to some blogs that would resonate with the camping audience, and I did not find many. Maybe the blog on The Camping Machine site will find readers among those who’ve looked for a camping blog.

Ultimately The Camping Machine website will replace this blog. The blog portion of the webite will be written by The Family Man, will sound like The Family Man and contain stories that would have appeared on The Family Man blog. In fact, if anyone knows how to link a Blogger blog to a regular web site please let me know and I’ll just change the name and bring this blog to The Camping Machine site.

If you go to the site now you’ll see I’m re-running some of my earlier Family Man posts. I’m trying to keep the content on that site fresh, and I actually am enjoying seeing some of my earlier posts again. People who visit the site as a result of puttering along behind the trailer for 45 minutes won’t know these posts are re-runs. Soon I will mix in new posts with the re-runs and it won’t belong before it is all new content.

So please check out the new website. If you are linking to this blog please change your link to The Camping Machine. If I don’t already link to your site, send me your link and I’ll put it on the site. And if you visit my site please give me your feedback and let me know what you think.

I’ll have to decide if I want to keep my sign-off. It is great to be the Family Man, but it’s a bit out of context on the new site.

"Okay, Okay, Okay!"

It’s funny, sometimes, how you can associate a person with a phrase they often say.

In our family each one of us has a phrase that we’re know for. MBWs phrase is “God, give me strength…” usually uttered after Tommy does something he shouldn’t, such as this. My phrase is “God bless it!” which, as you might have guessed, is the PG version of a much stronger statement – again, often delivered in a moment of frustration. An exasperated “Oh, man!” is what Chris says when he is told he can’t do something he wants to do right when he wants to do it. Tommy’s phrase is “Okay, okay okay!!!” when he is told, for the fifth time, to come to the dinner table and eat. We occasionally share a laugh when we hear each other saying these particular words. In fact, as I write this, I can hear the tone of voice and visualize the facial expression of MBW, Chris and Tommy as they say their trademark lines.

But for this particular post I will borrow Tommy’s phrase and say, “Okay, okay, okay!” And I’ll add to it by saying, “I’m sorry I haven’t posted. I’m sorry I haven’t written more. I’m sorry I have not kept up with my blog and have not visited yours.”

I think, if I can remember back that far, that in my last few posts I alluded to not feeling like I had the time to do the kind of writing I wanted to do. I believe I said I did not want to do short, update posts because this was never intended to be that kind of blog. Many people have blogs that are updated frequently and describe the daily activities of the writer and his/her friends and family. To be brutally honest the daily, mundane activities of my life are not worth the pixels required to communicate them to others, so in this blog I had (for the most part) elected to only expend pixels when I had something to say that I thought was worthy of your time, as well as mine. You may disagree, but I thought this post, this post, and and this one were interesting, amusing or touching, to one degree or another. That is the kind of writing I want to do.

But those moments don’t regularly come up twice a week and I had been running out of things to say. And when they did come up, I would think to myself, “I should post this on the blog”, but I wouldn’t get around to it. There was always something else that had to be done. When there was time, the moments I considered writing about had passed and I couldn’t recall the details that would have made the post interesting. When I sat down to write, I could only think of the trite, everyday moments that don’t make for interesting reading. As vain as this may sound, I did not want to waste your time, or mine, with a mindless, empty, vapid post.

Hence, the lack of words for the last 7 months or so.

It’s not like I haven’t been doing anything else. I’ve not been sitting around watching TV when I could have been writing for this blog – if you read this you know that. I have changed jobs yet again, begun working on a new website, skied with the family about 15 times and I’m coaching soccer once again. I’ve promised Chris and Tommy I would teach them how to catch fish – and actually this weekend we are going to the local lake to try fishing for the very first time. But there’s one thing, more than any other, that has taken time away from writing for this blog.

I’m trying to write a novel.

For the past 20 years I have had a story idea in my head. I would think about the story, and in particular the central character, off and on for weeks and months at a time. I would visualize scenes, dialog and settings as I commuted to work each day. The one thing I didn’t do was actually site down and write.

I’ve read more than one blog where the author talked about wanting to write a book. Some actually have contracts in place, others suspended their blog to write the book, and others blog about wanting to write a book. So it might be fair to say that blogging is a substitute, for some bloggers, for writing a novel. For me, blogging was a novelty, something new to try just to see how it would go. I honestly never expected anyone to read it, and I don’t know if you can imagine my genuine surprise when I started to receive comments from people who enjoyed what I had to say.

It was never about warming up to write a novel.

But when I hit my birthday last fall, realizing I was one year older and one year further removed from accomplishing anything, I made a commitment to take a shot at writing the story I have had in my head for so long. Time to put up or shut up. Make a legitimate effort to write the thing, or admit I wasn’t ever going to do it and stop thinking about it all the time.

Now if you are still reading this post, and if you’ve been a reader of this blog for any length of time, you might be thinking the book I have in mind is a family book. Maybe the story of my family, derived from some of the posts in this blog. Maybe you’re thinking it’s a story about a fictional family that goes though some of same things I’ve written about here.

Nope.

The story I want to write is science fiction.

The thing is I’m not really a huge science fiction guy. I’ve read my share of SF but I’m not a geek about it. I don’t do Star Trek. I like the original Dune stories but even that series wore on me after the second one; and the new series co-written by Frank Herbert’s son is a bit to bland and programmatic for me. So I’m not even really sure why I want to write this particular story.

But I do want to write it. I think it would make a good read. And I don’t think you’d have to be a SF geek to enjoy it. So I made the commitment and started to write the story in November. Yes, I sat down almost every night and put words on the screen. My goal was to write a chapter every month, and if I could stick to that I’d have a loose first draft in about 2 years.

So here I am, mid-May, and I have one chapter complete and the first page of chapter 2 done.

Not doing so well, am I?

But I’m sticking with it. I sit down and open the Word document almost every night, or at a minimum 5 nights a week. Some nights I make good progress, but most nights I struggle to get a paragraph complete. Writing that story does not flow nearly as easily as writing this post. For something I have thought about for so long, it just doesn’t seem to flow onto the page. What bothers me is when I go back and read what I’ve written, I don’t think it is very good.

So I’ll keep plugging along and see how it goes. My two-year time frame isn’t realistic, but maybe a four-year time frame is. Maybe the further along I go the more easily it will flow. Or maybe it will go nowhere. But at least I will have given it a fair shot.

I have received some email messages from people asking me why I stopped posting and if I planned to resume posting on this site. I think I've ansered the why I stopped, and, to quote my son – “Okay, Okay, Okay!” I promise to try to do better about posting here. There have been a couple of incidents that I think would make for good posts. And if you are reading this, please take a look at my new website. It’s more than just a travel site – it’s also a place for me to share photographs and talk about things outside of my Family Man role. In fact, if you remember this Family Man post, I will answer the question on my new site. It won’t be obvious, you’ll have to look for it, but I will put it there.

Thank you for reading.

It’s Great to be The Family Man

Hello Once again

Hi there.

I've been away a long time.

I've recently created a new web site. If you'd like to take a look, go here.

Thanks,
The Family Man