Colorado River Reflections

One of my favorite photos...the river can be a churning monster one minute and a calming, soothing ripple the next. This did wonders for the soul...

Fun with Flickr

My favorite travel adventure was when I rafted the Colorado River for 16 days in June 2004 with my family of four. My two children, ages 15 and 19 at the time, also brought two friends, so there were only a total of six of us in two 18-foot rafts. Fortunately, my husband has been whitewater rafting for 30 years, so I felt like I was with a pro. Little did I realize that the waves on the river were so huge, as can be seen in the left photo. It was scary at times, but exhilirating! We would sit down by the mighty river every evening, reflecting on the day's experiences, and anticipate the next day's rapids (I would worry a bit, while the rest of my clan would be excited). Flickr has proven to be a valuable website for storing photos, and sharing pics with others in the trip. I can see where I will definitely use it in the future for my travel adventures. It is always fun to see what other people have captured with their cameras.

Trekkin' to Tunes

Streaming music is great! I have iTunes on my computer at home which I of course download to my iPod frequently as I add songs. Pandora, though, opened a whole new "box" of songs for me. I love that similar songs are chosen for you once you've set up your favorite artist stations. I've heard many songs that I've forgotten about, or are not familiar with, ones that I now add to my iTunes library, and consequently, my iPod. I always take my iPod with me on road trips, using an adapter for the car stereo, and it is, of course, my best friend on airplanes, too. Because of Pandora, I will be adding many more tunes to my current library of 1500, and this will make traveling even that much more fun!

Feeding A Desire

RSS and Feed Readers are very helpful for my purposes! Not only can I subscribe to my favorite websites for book reviews, I also can keep up-to-date on travel feeds, including the latest sale prices. This has saved me a substantial amount of time since I can go into my Bloglines account rather than spending all that time looking at each individual website. Yay! The only problem is, Bloglines is now feeding me an immense desire to travel...

Worldwide Chatting

I have been using IM for just over a year now and find it extremely useful. I use it when I am checking my inbox in my gmail account and my son, daughter or friends also happen to be online, checking their gmails. I can look at my emails and also have a live chat with them. When my son was studying in Costa Rica last year for 3 months without his phone, he would go into an internet cafe daily and check his emails. Often I would catch up with him then, and chat with him about his experiences. It was a great way to hear from him and alleviate any worries. Also, because our gmail chats were automatically saved, I now have a travelogue of his life in Costa Rica. Recently, I was in Canada, my son was in Mexico, and my daughter was in California for spring break. Because we didn't want to pay any extra international phone charges, we could catch up with each other through our gmail live chats. I can definitely see the importance of IM when traveling!