This week my world was once again too boring to provide a current event story. But it wasn’t too busy which is the other reason I sometimes use a canned post, as I most recently did on February 19 (Trip Peek # 122 Trip #84 Finding Holland), or recycle an older post, as I most recently did on January 29 (Happy Imbolc Again). So, instead of doing either of those things, I’m going to write about something on this website that I feel doesn’t get enough attention. That might really be saying something since I naturally feel that the entire website doesn’t get enough attention. I’m talking about the clickable collage of thumbnail images from completed trips.

I’ve had vague ideas about tooting this particular horn in the past but never pursued them very far. I thought of it again this week when I realized I had a little time to write a post but no real-time topic to write about. When that happened, I quickly realized that this was a pretty good time to write about the collage. You see the count of completed trips is currently a multiple of ten and the collage is ten images wide. That means I could produce the image above (which links to the real thing) without the uneven lower edge that it has 90% of the time.

For any that don’t know, this website came into being in 1999 to document a single road trip then hung around to document those that followed. Before long, a chronological list of completed trips appeared with highlights and such and links to the individual journals. This blog was added in 2011 to better support non-road trip postings and allow reader comments.

My 100th road trip occurred just a few months after the blog was started and there was a blog post noting it (The First One Hundred). I had already been selecting a single image from each trip to use in a now-retired feature on the home page and I included a collage of those images in that post. Just a couple of weeks later, the static collage was replaced with a clickable version that has grown as trips are completed and added. Hovering over an individual image will display the sequential number, year, and name of the trip. Clicking it leads to the associated journal.

I get great pleasure from just looking at the collage because each of those images has the potential for triggering tons of memories and together they remind me how much fun I’ve had over the last couple of decades. That will undoubtedly become even more valuable as more years go by. Of course, no one else has those memories to be triggered. I am very much aware of that but hope that others that look over the collage will see something they recognize or something they think interesting and worth a further look. There are 170 trips represented there now and it continues to grow slowly. I encourage you to take a look by clicking the opening image.

In addition to that 100th trip post where the collage first appeared, it was also mentioned a few years ago in a post on Some Subtle Stuff. A look at that might be worthwhile if that sort of thing interests you.