The year in numbers with 2016 values in parentheses:

• 9 (7) = Road trips reported
• 73 (69) = Blog posts
• 66 (90) = Days on the road
• 1896 (2418) = Pictures posted — 284 (323) in the blog and 1612 (2095) in Road Trips

Things are more or less back to normal after last year’s extra long (and extra exotic) Alaska trip boosted the days and pictures counts significantly. The number of blog posts was nudged upward by 2017 having 53 Sundays. The regular weekly posts were augmented with links for the nine road trips and eleven reviews. In a flip-flop from last year’s summary, two new-for-2017 blog posts made the top five while no new-for-2017 trip journal entries did. The Hawaii trip was closest at number ten.

Top Blog Posts:

1. Remembering Timmy
   The most visited post of 2017 was also the saddest. Musician and friend Tim Goshorn died in mid-April just weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Tim and brothers Larry and Dan put the Goshorn name in the top tier of the Cincinnati music scene and Tim and Larry became nationally known as members of Pure Prairie League. That fame and the fact that he was just such a wonderful person had a lot of people sharing memories on the internet. In this post I shared some of mine.
2. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
   The first post in the My Wheel series maintains its perfect top five record with a third second place ranking to go with two firsts. Visitors appear to continue to come through specific searches with no interest in anything else on this site. But I still appreciate them.
3. Book Review — The World from My Bike
   This is the other 2017 post in the top five. It’s a book review that is here due to the author’s popularity and because she shared the review with her own followers. Anna Grechishkina is not yet a famous author but she is becoming well known as a traveler. This is her first book and it’s filled with photos and thoughts from her not yet complete motorcycle ride around the world. It’s certainly impressive and I’m betting there will be at least one more after she completes her journey and is back home in Ukraine.
4. Scoring the Dixie
   This post about keeping track of driven sections of the Dixie Highway placed fourth when it was published in 2012, was third in 2015, and is back at fourth for 2017. I’m sensing a slow increase in interest in all old roads including the Dixie Highway. In the year’s closing months, there was even a slight uptick in the popularity of my own Dixie Highway related book, A Decade Driving the Dixie Highway, as sales rose from abysmal to anemic.
5. Ohio’s Revolutionary War Battle
   This 2012 post appears in the top five for the second time. In 2013, when it ranked fourth, I attributed its popularity to the bicentennial of the War of 1812 and the post’s mention of names associated with that war. This year I have no theory at all.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

1. Ohio Barn Dance
   Both of this year’s top two non-blog posts are mysteries to me. The most visited journal entry is a rather simple 2007 day trip on some scenic southern Ohio roads. The name comes from the fact that several old barns were passed along the way. In researching 2017 statistics, I discovered a big goof. Trip Peeks are blog posts that I publish when I have nothing better. Each one references the journal of a randomly selected road trip. A Trip Peek for Ohio Barn Dance was published in 2017. In fact it was published twice. First on October 22 and again on November 26. How that happened I don’t know but it did. It’s tempting to say the journal traffic is the result of the double posting but it clearly isn’t. For one thing, Trip Peeks never generate enough interest to account for anything near what this entry saw. Besides, the surge appears to have started back in April long before the first Trip Peek posting.
2. Bi Byways
   I don’t understand this 2004 two day trip coming in second in in 2017 any more than I understood it coming in second in 2015 or first in 2016. The byways involved are the Miami and Erie Canal Scenic Byway and the Maumee Valley Byway and all of OH-66 is included.
3. Tadmor
   This is an Oddment page about an Ohio ghost town. After ranking first, second, and first in the first three “Rearview” posts (2011, 2012, 2013), it dropped out of the rankings but reappears for 2017.
4. Alaska
   The journal for that long 2016 trip to Alaska was number three last year and hangs on to number four this year.
5. Finding It Here
   This was a three day Christmas Escape Run that never left Ohio, but it was the last trip of 2016 so had all year to accumulate enough views to claim fifth place.

Once again, overall traffic numbers were mixed. Visits, which dropped slightly last year, increased from 107,898 to 138,047, while blog views dropped again, going from 8,136 to 7485. Page views were nearly unchanged with 579,110 for 2016 and 578,893 for 2017.

Though it didn’t make the top five, the highest ranked new journal entry, My Fiftieth: Hawaii, marked a significant real word milestone for me. As the title suggests, reaching Hawaii meant I could now claim to have visited all fifty states of the union. It also provided a pretty good reason to write another book. That book, 50 @ 70, celebrates reaching fifty states and seventy years of age at the same time. Unlike my previous two books, 50 @ 70 isn’t associated with a particular road (or any thing else) so doesn’t even get attention from niche road fans. Sales need to increase a bunch to be considered abysmal. Anemic is probably out of range.