The year in numbers with 2021 values in parentheses:

• 6 (4) = Road trips reported
• 67 (65) = Blog posts
• 35 (51) = Days on the road
• 1675+ (1895) = Pictures posted — 748 (449) in the blog and 927 (1399) in Road Trips

For the third year in a row, the first topic mentioned in the year-end review is COVID-19. On one hand, its grip on travel was loosened a bit and some postponed trips and events were allowed to take place. On the other, the virus had its most personal impact on me yet. In the middle of a trip, I tested positive for COVID-19 myself and, although the symptoms were quite mild, the trip was effectively over at that point. I drove directly home and isolated. Evidence of the loosening of COVID’s grip is the increase in my personal trip count but none of those trips were particularly long so days on the road and the number of photos posted from road trips both decreased. None of the 2022 trips generated enough traffic to make the top five non-blog posts and none of last year’s top five non-blog posts returned this year. A personal post noting my own birthday was the most visited new blog post of the year.

Top Blog Posts:

1. Book Review A Good Road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound
   This is the first book review to ever appear in the top five and it is pretty obvious why it is here. It was published in October 2021 and got a decent number of visits on its own but the vast majority of visits in 2022 came from the YellowstoneTrail.org website which added a link to the review as part of its information on the book. That led not only to the review becoming one of the year’s top five posts but to YellowstoneTrail.org becoming the number three (behind Google and Facebook) source of visitors to this blog. There are aspects of that “captive” relationship that might mean it should not be considered in the rankings but other posts have received boosts from aligned websites with no ramifications so I’m ignoring them for now.
2. Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
   For the third year in a row, this post about a nineteenth-century stagecoach stop turned roadhouse and then destroyed comes in at number two.  Before the three consecutive seconds, it had three firsts (2012, ’13, 19), one fourth (2014), and one fifth (2018).
3. Scoring the Dixie
   After two consecutive firsts, this post about tracking driven portions of the Dixie Highway drops to third. It was also third in 2015 as well as fourth in 2012 and 2017. Although I’ve made other posts on the Dixie Highway, search engines seem to like this one best. “Dixie Highway map” brings some of the searchers here and some are looking for information on the historic Dixie Highway. Sadly, I know that some folks arrive here because they think Dixie is a dirty word. I don’t know what they think when they leave.
4. I 75
   The fourth most popular post overall was the most popular of new posts for the year and that makes it the one from which the opening image is taken. It was created for my seventy-fifth birthday. Proving, in a bizarre way, that skin sells, it seems all but certain that its popularity was due to that photo of my freshly shaved head. At the time, I was using a 2015 photo taken at The Bean in Chicago as my Facebook profile picture. I decided I would try to produce a hairless version of that photo using the same shirt and sunglasses and attempting to copy the angle and position. Although it may not always be obvious, images in these Rear View posts are reversed from the original so that they appear as they might in a rearview mirror. That is how the 2015 photo already appeared as it was of my reflection in the stainless steel sculpture. Since my attempt at reproduction did not involve a reflection, I reversed the image in the I 75 post to more closely match the original. So, when it came time to put the image in this year-end summary, I had to unreverse it. I can only hope that this attention to detail is appreciated appropriately.
5. Cincy Burger Week Plus
   I ate seven hamburgers on seven consecutive days for this post. Since my blog week is skewed from Cincinnati Burger Week by a day, my seven ‘burgers included one from outside the city. This post barely edged out the 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner post for fifth place ending the Flightliner’s unbroken run in the top five since its publication in 2013. I could have included it by booting the Yellowstone Trail book review based on its cozy relationship with the YT site but I was far from comfortable with that.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

1. Lincoln Highway Conference 2011
   After waiting a decade for its first appearance, this Lincoln Highway conference outing is back in the top-five list for the second time in three years. It ranked third in 2020 but takes the number one spot this time. Of course, I have no idea why, but I do know it has a lot to like. It’s twenty-five days long and includes, besides considerable Lincoln Highway, some time on CA-1 along the California coast, bits of Historic Route 66, and the entire length of US-36. 
2. Sixty-Six: E2E & F2F
   My third full-length drive of Historic Route 66 is back for its sixth top-five finish. It has previously achieved two firsts (2012, 2021), a fourth (2018), a fifth (2015), and another second (2019). The abbreviations in its name stand for End to End and Friend to Friend.
3. Lincoln Highway West
   This 2009 trip was my first documented travel on the Lincoln Highway beyond Indiana. It ranked fifth in 2014 and fourth in 2020.
4. Kids & Coast
   This 2008 fly-and-drive is making only its second top-five appearance after cracking the list at second in 2020. It’s a good one with a drive on the west coast between Seattle and San Francisco where my sons lived at the time.
5. Wild and Wonderful Again
   After a stay-at-home holiday in 2020, it was good to make an actual Christmas Escape Run in 2021. As I did in 2013, I targeted a West Virginia state park for Christmas Day but it was not the same park. The six-day trip drew enough attention over the next year to earn a top-five spot.

Both blog visits and overall website visits continued or renewed declines that had briefly paused. Overall visits dropped from 112,255 to 102,804. Blog visits dropped from 5,201 to 4,187. The decline in visits makes the increase in page views surprising to the point of being shocking. Last year’s all-time record of 832,848 page views was surpassed by this year’s 924,495 page views. It seems that fewer visitors are enjoying (I sincerely hope so) it more.

I finished up last year’s Rear View by mentioning a book that had been published during the year based on a trip made the previous year. I’m now doing it again. Amazingly, both the journal and the blog post for the trip on which 20 in ’21 and the YT Too is based appeared in their respective top five lists last year. Neither made the cut for 2022. The book was published in May, and “reviewed” here.

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