So about those e-pushpins – they continue to get added even as we’re traveling. I like chatting up locals and often get comments like: you gotta visit XYZ!! And then there’re the e-pushpins that add themselves like: there’s something wrong with the brakes on our 6-ton RV – where’s the nearest brake service!? Each addition often spawns a few more (why waste a visit to an unexpected town?) and so the pushpin count continues to grow.
I’ve always had a fascination with travel and for the past 20 or 30 years (give or take a few) whenever Doug or I learned of an interesting place to visit we put a pushpin on an electronic map. (It actually started with a little silver bucket with small pieces of paper and a pen on the bookshelf in our living room – our ‘Bucket List’ bucket – evolving from bookshelf to computer to The Cloud, but the concept still holds.) (We also keep track of the source of each so that friends who made the recommendations receive proper attribution.) Anyhow, as we got close to retiring those e-pushpins were nearly out of control. We’ve now spent a good part of the last 12 years reining things in, tracking and checking off the locations, marking some for a possible revisit, thanking the folks who sent us somewhere, and learning effective strategies to navigate our pushpin map.