For those of you reading this who have a blog or website, and use a stat counter, you probably have noticed the occasional international visitor.  Sometimes the person from another country has sought out your site specifically, other times they stumbled onto your site through a Google search.

This happens to me more than I would have expected.  I get quite a few hits resulting from Google image searches.  In fact I probably get four or five visits to my website per day from people who type ‘Goblins’ into a Google Image search.  At first I could not figure out why I got so many hits from people looking for Goblins, but then it occured to me – I wrote a piece about our visit to Goblin Valley State Park last summer (you can read it on the Travels page) and included several photos of the unique rock formations there –which are called ‘goblins.’  Imagine a searchers' disappointment when they expect to see trolls and other goblin-type creatures and instead see sandstone formations in the desert of central Utah that some person in the 1920’s referred to as Goblins.

So you can probably imagine the number of hits this site had last Halloween.  How disappointed I was when I checked my stats and saw all those visitors, only to find out they weren’t interested in my compelling prose or the adventures we have in The Camping Machine.  They wanted to see pictures of Halloween goblins so they could figure out cute ways to dress up their kids for trick-or-treating.

When I check my stats and see I’ve had a visitor from another country I always wonder what they were thinking when they hit my site.  What did the person from Greece think, or the visitor from Brazil, the visitors from the United Kingdom, India, Poland, Australia, France, Bulgaria and Costa Rica – not to mention the several visitors from Canada?  What do they think when they hit a site about a family with a travel trailer in the USA? By the way, I really have had visitors from each of these countries – and all in the past 48 hours.

I think it is neat that a simple person like me can reach people around the globe with a website.  Not that I’m making any sort of impression, for the most part – most of these international visitors quickly discover my site is not what they were looking for and move on.  Many of them are on the site for five seconds or fewer and have just one page view.  But occasionally someone will find something of interest and stay for a few minutes, look at a couple of different pages, look at some photos or watch a couple of my film clips ('To Live and Drive in LA' gets the most hits, but 'The Exuberance of Youth' is my personal favorite). 

I enjoy seeing the locations from around the world pop up on my stat counter.  It would be fun to receive comments from some of these visitors, but as you may have noticed this website template does not allow for the posting of comments.  I do get the occasional email (send one now!  campingmachineguy@gmail.com).  However, no international visitor has ever sent me an email.

Until last week, when I was very surprised to receive the following email message:

Hi, I am the editor of newspaper in Guangzhou, south of China. I like the photo about RV in your blog and want to use some photos in our newspaper.  May I do that?

So of course I wrote back that yes, they could use photos from my site if they would give a photo credit to www.thecampingmachine.com.  The editor wrote back and said yes, they would print a photo credit, and that was that.

So the other day I get another email from the editor of the newspaper in Guangzhou, south of China, along with the image you see below.

 

Of course, I cannot read any of it (Yes, I can read Motorhomes!).  But there is the picture of The Camping Machine, in all its glory along the red rock cliffs of southern Utah.  In a Chinese newspaper.  Surrounded by characters I cannot read.

The Camping Machine has now officially been to China.  I, on the other hand, have never been to China.

But I think it is neat that the image the editor of the newspaper in Guangzhou, south of China, selected was of a travel trailer parked in front of what could be considered a very scenic cliff.  Or a wall, if you will. 

A Great Wall.

Interesting, don’t you think?

I am a worrier.

It is just my nature.  Hard-wired into my DNA.  Everyone has a skill, and mine is worrying. 

You can’t imagine the things I worry about.  I won’t tell you all of them; you don’t have a week to read that post.  But let me give you some examples. 

For the RVers who read this blog, I worry every time I hitch up that my trailer will break away from my Suburban.  I constantly check my mirrors to make sure it’s still back there where it belongs.  I am convinced that one day I’ll be driving down the interstate and I will see my own trailer in the lane next to me.  I double and triple-check my hitch, equalizer bars, safety chain, and yet I am still convinced the trailer did not make it up the mountain pass and is at that very minute barreling backwards down the road heading straight for an unsuspecting Mini-Cooper.

In those rare instances when I’m not worrying about towing the trailer –say, when we’re camped for the night and the wheels are securely chocked - I am worried that I left the front door to the house wide open.  It’s bad enough that every time we leave to go camping I know for a fact that every criminal in our county has driven by our house, noticed that our trailer is not parked alongside our house on the RV pad, and is patiently waiting until dark to go in and steal every last thing in the home.  That’s bad enough, but when I wake with a start at 2:00 AM and wonder if I remembered to lock the door, well, that makes me want to drive home and check.

If by chance the door is in fact locked, that does not mean we somehow did not leave the iron plugged in, teetering on the edge of the ironing board, just waiting for the cat to knock it over and set the house on fire.  I fully expect every time we round the last corner coming home to see our house burnt to the foundation, everything we own reduced to a pile of warm ashes.

There are, naturally, billions of other, less critical worries.  Did I remember to stop the newspaper while we are traveling?  Did I remember to have the post office hold the mail?  Did I re-program the lawn sprinklers so we don’t come home to either a burned-out brown lawn or a water-soaked rice paddy?  Did we make arrangements for the cat?

Then there are the Adult worries.  Am I saving enough for retirement?  What about the kid’s college funds?  This one is a never-ending source of anxiety as the market continues to melt away both buckets of money these days.  And due to the fact that I timed my marriage and subsequent having of children, I will be trying to time my retirement at the same time I am trying to put two kids through college.  Great planning on my part, don’t you think?  And it’s not like I made any money in my 20’s and early 30’s – I was a TV News Cameraman in those years.  Minimum wage was not far below my pay grade then.

I could list dozens, it not hundreds, of other things that keep me up at night, but I think you have the concept here so I’ll spare you all the examples.  But there are monsters in my closet, and don’t try to tell me there aren’t. 

Night-lights help.  Sometimes.

But there is one worry I have finally put to rest.  Actually, it wasn’t me who put it to rest – it was my seven-year-old son Chris.

You may have seen some of his athletic prowess on the soccer field last fall in the short soccer clip I posted on this site.  I now have moved the video clips to the Multimedia page, to make finding these gems a bit easier.  If you haven’t seen that clip, go to that page and scroll down to where it says ‘He Shoots, He Scores!’  I really have no illusions that he will become a soccer star, but it was fun to see him do well.

But Chris has outdone himself now.  He is this year playing in his first recreational basketball league, and he is doing very well.  He’s having fun, yes, but even more than that, he is taking a big load of worry off his Dad’s shoulders.

How is he doing that by shooting hoops, you ask?

He’s just cut my future college costs in half.

Yep, he’s scholarship material.  No question about it.  The scouts will be calling once I send the tape.  Even though he is only seven, it’s not too soon for an early look at recruiting for the class of 2018. 

You are skeptical.  You know you are.  So I’ll put your doubts at rest.

Go to the Multimedia page of this site and read the paragraph called Hoop Hoop Hurray!  Click on the link below and you’ll see for yourself.  He moves without the ball.  He shoots lights-out.  He boards.  He passes.

The Complete Package.

Yeah, Dad sleeps better at night these days.  One college education paid for.  Not only that, Tommy’s pretty darn smart.  Maybe he gets the academic free ride.

And who knows?  If Chris makes it to the NBA, maybe my retirement is taken care of as well!

Now, it I could just do something about those monsters in the closet, I could manage the rest of my worries all by myself.

Maybe.

A few years ago I used to have a blog, which I have discontinued to direct my attention to this site.  I enjoy the flexibility of this site and the opportunity to post varied types of information- blog posts, photos, videos, and the ability to change page layouts.  It is a nice creative outlet.

During the time I had my previous blog I would occasionally get ‘tagged.’  This is a game among bloggers.  If you are ‘Tagged,’ you must do the following:

Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.

Share 5 random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog.

Share the 5 top places on your "want to see or want to see again" list.

Tag a minimum of 5 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
 

For the record I didn’t especially enjoy getting tagged on my Blogger blog.  I tried then, and still do now, to post thoughtful, funny, interesting or otherwise useful posts – ideally that would entertain, provoke thought or simply put a wry smile on someone’s face.  Ultimately you are the judge as to whether or not I have met my own standards, but nonetheless that is what I strive for.  I would rather someone come to feel as if they know me or would want to know me by the content of my cumulative posts as opposed to a list of five random or weird facts about me.

When I abandoned my Blogger blog and launched The Camping Machine I thought the tagging thing would be less prevalent,  My thought was the RV community was less into the standard blogging fare. 

What I have come to realize is that this site is less about RV/Camping than it is about family.  Let’s face it, we only camp between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  We will never have the RV material that full-timers do.  Why we ended up with The Camping Machine (the website) is because The Camping Machine (the travel trailer) has brought us so much family enjoyment that we have wrapped it around the story of our lives together, of growing up together, and sharing experiences that my kids will (hopefully) cherish long after I am gone.

Which makes this site, at the end of the day, more like a blog after all.

Even so, I would be tempted just to blow off the whole tag thing except for one thing.  I was tagged by FabGrandma, who’s blog, writing and photographs I have come to enjoy immensely.  Not only that, she was one of the first sites to link to mine and I get more referrals from her site than almost any other.  So I certainly don’t want her mad at me!

So since it was she who tagged me, I will comply with most of the rules, if only to show her that I am honored that out of all her friends in the Blogosphere she selected me as one of her five ‘Taggees.’

Thanks to FabGrandma, you now get to learn the following about The Camping Machine Guy.  Here goes:

Five Random Weird Facts About Me:

1.  I drink Diet Coke like a man marooned in a desert for a week would drink water.

2.  For the past five years I have eaten nothing but plain oatmeal for breakfast.  Every day, without fail.  Five years.

3.  The pinnacle of my sports glory came when I was 12 years old, playing recreational league ice hockey in Syracuse, New York.  In the league semi-final game I scored a Hat Trick (three goals in one game) in 1 minute, 29 seconds.  We won 6-0.  In the championship we lost 6-0.  It was all downhill from there.

4.  I hold both a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Left Brained) and an Masters of Business Administration (Right Brained).  I have average creativity and average business acumen.  Good at many things, great at none.

5.  As a TV News Cameraman I once shot a story about a single man, mid-40’s who made art out of seashells.  I mean large, three-dimensional sculptures – faces, cars, futuristic buildings.  The work was…unusual.  Eclectic.  Awful.  He could not understand why the world was not beating a path to his door to buy his creations.  Never mind he lived in a land-locked state over 500 miles form the nearest beach.  As you might imagine, his story never made air.

The Top Five Places I Want To See:

1.  The Gettysburg battlefield.  Not during one of those re-creation events, but perhaps in fall, when the field is silent.  I want to walk that ground, close my eyes, and imagine what it must have felt like to stand on Little Round Top, know you were the end of the line, and see the grey army charging up at you.  It will be close to a religious experience for me.

2..The Equator.  I want to stand on the Equator at high noon on March  21, look down, and not see my shadow.

3.  Antactica.  The least visited continent.  The closest I’ll ever get to ‘boldly go where not everyone else has already been.  The least likely of the five on this list, but if it’s not on the list the less likely it will be I’ll get there.

4.  Key West.  About as far away as you can get from where I live and still be in the USA.  I’ve been to Alaska, I’ve been to Hawaii.  I’d like to haul The Camping Machine all the way out there, camp for one night and come back, for no other reason that to say I did it.

5.  London, Paris, the whole pre-packaged European tour thing.  Not for me, but for my wife.  She wants to go, and because I am such a thoughtful, loving and considerate husband I realize it’s not ALL about me.  So we will probably do this when the kids are in High School.  Heck, it’s far more likely that the Equator or Antarctica.

So there it is.  I have fulfilled the tag thing – well, most of it.  This is the point at which I am supposed to tag five other people on my list of links.  Rather that choose five of you, four of whom will either not participate or do so grudgingly, I will throw it open to anyone who has read this far.  If you are so inclined, write a blog post referencing this site and write your own responses to the questions above.

After all, once you’ve done it you might possibly come to the realization that despite how much you dreaded it, it wasn’t that bad.  Perhaps even a bit of fun.

Not that I feel that way, mind you…!

For those of you who have visited this page and read more than one or two entries, you may remember that back in the days of my youth (waaaaaay back – late 1980’s to be precise) I was a TV News Cameraman.  It may be hard to believe, if you’ve seen the photos of me cliff jumping (see the Travels page of this site and scroll down a ways) that in fact I once was a young, strapping single guy, capable of hauling around all that heavy news camera gear.  Being a TV News Photographer was a great job for a guy who didn’t need to make a ton of money, enjoyed being in the thick of the action and loved to make images. 

 

That was me on all accounts.

 

I did that job for over 10 years, starting out in Great Falls, Montana at KFBB, moving on to Reno, Nevada at KOLO-TV and finally ending up in Salt Lake City at a station whose call letters I’ll refrain from stating.  I arrived at that station as the transition was being made from ¾” tape, with a separate camera and deck connected by cable, to the first Betacam units.  What a thrill that was to lose that dinosaur of a record deck!

 

I had an opportunity to cover several exciting stories over the course of my career in TV News.  I had been with KFBB-TV for about three months when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up – I was driving the News Car to a VO when I heard the news on a Canadian radio station.  Later I was at Cape Canaveral when the Space Shuttle Discovery was launched, the first shuttle to fly after the Challenger.  I was the lead photog for my station when the NBA All-Star game to Salt Lake City.  I had the chance to fly in a helicopter with the Avalanche Control team when they were proactively knocking down potential slides in the steep canyon walls of the Wasatch front ahead of opening the local ski areas.  I was able to shoot several slides roaring down narrow canyon chutes – fantastic footage that still gives me shudders today when I see that footage, now over ten years old, still run on the local news as stock footage.  Being a TV news cameraman provided opportunities to see and photograph in person things most people never see – except on the Nightly News.

 

With that said, there were also hours of tedium.  Standing behind the County Jail, waiting for some prisoner to be escorted out of the building and into a waiting van (‘the perp walk’) for the ride to court.  Doing so in a driving rainstorm.  Waiting for several hours because the news desk told you to be there at 8:00 AM and the perp wasn’t actually scheduled to walk until 11:00 AM.  That’s the other end of the stick.

 

In my time in the business I found that there were two types of TV News Photographers – News guys who happened to be better at taking pictures than at ‘reporting’ it (and for the record I consider photojournalists to be reporters), and photographers who happened to be in the news business.

 

I was definitely the latter.

 

I got into the business because I loved to make images.  The opportunity to take pictures every day, put them on the air and watch them every night, along with thousands of other people, was a drug for me.  I loved it.

 

I won’t go into how I went from gung-ho TV News Guy who loved to shoot to the jaded, cynical Photog looking for an exit strategy.  That could be another post.  Suffice it to say I did get out of the business (on my own terms), and things have worked out well for me.  Still, I have not lost my passion for photography, which is why this site had lots of photos, some of which I think are pretty decent.

 

The point of this diatribe is simply this.  Up in my attic before the holidays, bringing down box after box of holiday decorations, I stumbled upon a collection of tapes from my days as a Photog.  Some were on ¾ inch tape, others were on beta.  There were actually more tapes than I remember saving.  Many of the stories I had listed on the tape box I could not even remember.  What I did remember, and was glad to see I have saved, were the ‘video essays’ – short pieces I shot on my own time, some which would serve as a show closer, others which served no other purpose than to fulfill my need, or desire, to use moving images and sound to create something interesting.  At least to me.

 

I took a couple of those tapes to a local dubbing facility and had them converted to Mini DV, which I ran through my Mac.  And now I have posted the first one to this website.

 When I first arrived in Salt Lake City to take my TV News Cameraman job I had traveled extensively, but I had never been to Los Angeles.  Shortly after my arrival there I was sent to LA for a story with a reporter.  Imagine my excitement – Los Angeles!  Hollywood!  Beverly Hills!

 

Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars.

 

So like a wide-eyed Jed Clampett I took it all in.  We were there for the day – fly in, shoot the story, drive back to the airport and get back to SLC.  Only one problem.  We had flown into Long Beach and were supposed to fly out of there as well, but we were late and missed out flight.  So we scrambled to find another flight home (we had to make the late news that night) and we did get a flight – out of LAX.

 

I don’t even remember what the story was we shot that day.  We did make it back in time to get that story on the air.  What I do remember was the drive from Long Beach to LAX, in afternoon traffic – and shooting the whole thing as I sat in the passenger seat.  I turned that footage into a video essay that never made air – I did it for my own enjoyment.  And now, 20 years later, it makes its Worldwide debut on this humble website.

 

If you go to the Multimedia page of this blog you will see a description of that video essay, which I’ve called To Live and Drive in LA.  Click the link and take a look.