The year in numbers with 2022 values in parentheses:

• 7 (6) = Road trips reported
• 81 (68) = Blog posts
• 47 (35) = Days on the road
• 2029 (1675) = Pictures posted — 866 (748) in the blog and 1,163 (927) in Road Trips

Everything went up this year. Everything that is except interest. I’ll discuss website traffic toward the end of this post but it’s probably not much of a spoiler to note that it continues its general decline. As for my own activity, I did get in one more trip than last year, and, unlike last year’s added trip, this one did translate to an increase in days on the road and pictures posted. Again, no trips from the year being reviewed made the top five but, unlike 2022 when there were no repeats from the previous year, the first four of 2023’s top five were repeats from 2022 and the fifth sort of was. Two of 2022’s top five blog posts made it again this year along with two brand new posts and one returning after an unusual absence. 

Top Blog Posts:

1. Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
   Making its ninth appearance in the top five, this post about a nineteenth-century stagecoach stop turned roadhouse follows three consecutive seconds with its fourth first place. The previous three were in 2012, 2013, and 2019. It also ranked fourth in 2014 and fifth in 2018. On top of all that, this year the Twenty Mile’s Last Stand post accomplished something never before seen. In years past, the blog’s home page has always had more visits than any individual post but this time even it was bested by this post.
2. Scoring the Dixie
   Like the Twenty Mile Stand post, this one moves up one spot from last year. It also appeared at third in 2015 plus first in 2020 and 2021 and fourth in 2012 and 2017. It describes my tracking of driven portions of the Dixie Highway. Because of some Conferedate-themed markers placed beside the road and what I consider a misunderstanding of the name, the Dixie Highway has been the subject of some negative stories in recent years. I’m not sure I entirely believe that “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” but I hope it is true in this case and that anyone brought here because of one of those negative articles sees that the Dixie Highway played an honorable and important part in the development of transportation in America.
3. Review: A Christmas Carol
   Not many posts make the top five in their first year of existence. The full twelve months that posts from previous years have to accumulate visits is hard to compete with which makes the fact that this post did it in barely half a month almost unbelievable. A Christmas Carol has long been a favorite at Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park but was skipped in 2022 while a new theater was built. This post took a look at a new production in the new theater and that seems to have been something that quite a few people were interested in.
4. Review: Route 66 Navigation
   This post, with the full name “Product Review — Route 66 Navigation — by Touch Media”, is also new for 2023. The product is a smartphone app that I wanted to review since its 2018 introduction but I did not get a chance to use it until the very end of 2022 then posted the review in February 2023. It was somewhat refreshing and quite encouraging to find that the product does just what it claims.
5. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
   It’s baaaack! After slipping from the top five last year for the first time since it was published, the initial post in the My Wheels series returns in the fifth spot. Previous rankings have been first (2014, 2015, 2018), second (2013, 2016, 2017), third (2019, 2020), and fourth (2021).

Top Non-Blog Posts:

1. Sixty-Six: E2E & F2F
   My third full-length drive of Historic Route 66 is back for its seventh top-five finish and its third finish in the top spot. It was also first in 2012 and 2021. In addition, it was second in 2019 and 2022, fourth in 2018, and fifth in 2015. The abbreviations in its name stand for End to End and Friend to Friend.
2. Lincoln Highway West
   This 2009 trip was my first documented travel on the Lincoln Highway west of Indiana. It ranked third last year, fourth in 2020, and fifth in 2014.
3. Lincoln Highway Conference 2011
   This Lincoln Highway-centered trip did not even appear in the top five until it took third in 2020 then placed first last year. It’s a good trip that adds all of US-36 and bits of the CA-1 and Route 66 to the Lincoln Highway bits.
4. Kids & Coast
   This makes two fourths in a row for this 2008 Seattle to San Francisco trip. Like the 2011 Lincoln Highway trip above, it waited a long time to make the list but came in second in 2020 and is becoming a regular.
5. Christmas MOP
   This is the top five finisher I said was sort of a repeat from 2022. The fifth-place non-blog entry in 2022 was the Christmas Escape Run of 2021. This year it is the Christmas Escape Run of 2022. My October Miles of Possibility trip had been cut short by COVID-19 so when Christmas came around I used a modified version of that unfulfilled itinerary for Christmas MOP. It may or may not be a coincidence that this trip is where I was able to study the Route 66 Navigation app for the review that was the fourth most popular blog post of 2023.

Blog visits edged up a bit but overall website visits continued to decline. I’m not completely confident that my web host is tracking and reporting statistics accurately but they are all I have. Overall visits dropped from 102,804 to 95,651. Blog visits rose from 4,187 to  4,366. Page views were completely out of sync with everything else last year when they hit an all-time high of 924,495. This year they are back in sync with the dropping visits at 651,826.

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