About Us and Triptacular
A few words on what we're up to and how it's going.
About a dozen years ago we had an idea to create an online space for people interested in travelling. We had the right skills, bought a domain and plotted our strategy. Naturally, life brought changes to our careers, changes to our homes and eventually two boys. The joy and the work of raising little ones tempered our approach to lots of things. Hobbies and passions were paused with the hopes that one day we would be able to refocus our efforts on them.
But balancing kids and code isn't always easy. I'm much older than I ever thought I would be working my way through the digital world.
In a lot of ways, the scope of our ambitions was too broad when we first thought about publishing something on the web. Then, about a year ago, we tried to narrow our lens a bit to focus on just one of our favorite areas of the world - Sedona, Arizona.
Sedona is a terrific place with unusually diverse and beautiful scenery. Situated up in the high desert mountains of the Southwest United States, Sedona offers a seasonal climate coupled with much dryer weather than most temperate areas which sport four seasons. Sedona also has quite a large number of hiking trails for nearly all ages, each with it's own unique and mesmerizing views.
We now have thousands of images of Sedona in our personal photo gallery. Just about all of them are quite picturesque without enhancement, and most of them taken with a simple iPhone.
Above is a picture I took today. In the distance a slim view of Courthouse Butte is rising just atop the tree line. My own faithful laptop is blocking a lot of scenery, but playing seat for my youngest son's long time stuffed pal, Peanut. Peanut himself, is managing to balance a small pile of rocks. If you squint you can even see my clumsy hands trying to snap the image in bad lighting. Maybe I should have asked my wife to take the picture. 😊
In some ways, little Peanut is telling my own story. Balancing a small pile of things while staying close to the code and trying to make it all feel artistic. Like me and Peanut, the road ahead for triptacular.com is following a similarly uneven pathway as I struggle to find something good and publish it upstream. There's a long way to go and a lot of unknowns, but we have some idea of what we'd like to accomplish.
- A liberally licensed image repository similar to unsplash but specific to Sedona. There are a few Sedona based image repositories on the Web already. Most of the existing sites are monetizing directly through the sale of very high quality and often digitally enhanced images. Nothing wrong with that, we may even try it on a select few images ourselves someday. By and large, however, we'd like to make most of our imagery available for re-use.
- A set of high quality blogs focusing on well known places in the Sedona area. These places include locations such as Westfork Trail, Bell Rock, and many others.
- Weather stats including current observations, near term forecasts and, eventually, longer term trends and statistics.
- A searchable collection of high quality hiking data. In fairness, alltrails.com has this covered along with a lot of images and other user contributions. It's just something I'd like to do for fun and to help the site stand out a tad.
There's a twist on the horizon. My wife was recently promoted. Consequently, we're moving to Beijing, China. It's an unusual and happy occasion for our family, but still very foreign and we don't know what to expect fully. It also means an end to my working life in the United States while I focus on raising the kids and on a long list of domestic needs.
There's a good possibility that I'll have more time to grow Triptacular. That's what I'm hoping for anyway. Then again, I'll need to learn a new language and new customs while overseas. And, to be honest, I could stand to shed some extra pounds that I've, more or less, been carrying around since our sons gifted us with a bevy of sleepless nights in their infancy. 🥱
I also think that some parts of Beijing and China at large will make their way into these pages. It seems too big and too interesting to leave aside. We're still unsure if Chinese tastes favor work like ours applied to their own motherland. So, we'll see. I hope we can respectfully showcase the Chinese part of our life.
Some people say it's the journey rather than the destination which ultimately makes a trip worthwhile. We hope that holds for us and that with time, care and precision the efforts we plant and nurture bear fruit in a future that seems today neither altogether clear nor cloudy.
Thanks for reading, and by the way, if this isn't the Triptacular you were looking for, please accept my apologies and see this entry ↪️.