Moving right along

Yesterday found the Airstream crossing Texas.  And the crossing took place on Blue Highways, not the main interstates.  It made for a pretty easy day of driving, and incredibly good time was made as well.

It struck me this morning when I got up that I didn’t break out the Canons once yesterday.  Whoops.  Sometimes it’s better to put the camera away and focus on where you’re headed.  Other times it’s better to focus on where you are.  Yesterday was a “where I’m headed” kind of a day.

While driving yesterday I conducted a little experiment.  Months ago I’d purchased Dragon Dictate for my Macintosh.  But I really haven’t experimented with it much.  I knew that I could have the program transcribe from an audio file, so I fired up my voice recorder on the IPhone and talked for a while.

Dragon still needs to learn my voice more.  Big time.  It transcribed about 70% accurately, but the rest.  A little weird.  But since I’m still sleepy and don’t feel like typing much more, I’ll give you yesterday’s notes from the transcription while driving.

This is going to be a completely different type of blog post. See I’m still currently in transit with the airstream in tow behind. I’m driving along the blue highways of Texas getting to the Oklahoma border.

What I’m doing right now is actually dictating to my iPhone in a recording program. When I get the airstream finally parked I’ll be offloading the audio to my laptop for Dragon Dictate to translate and we’ll see how this works.

Currently I’m driving somewhere between Wichita Falls in Amarillo Texas. I already have a destination set for the night so no big worries there. I got two hours 26 minutes remaining so I’ve got time.

I have to say it was a little awkward thinking out loud and creating a new post for the blog. Sure we all work through stories and articles in our heads before we sit down to type but actually dictating is a whole different world. If this works out I’ll need to become more comfortable with this and then I’ll do it more often as I travel.

The final destination for this trip, at least this leg of the trip, Cortez Colorado. I’ll be there for a week working on a new website and management systems for a favorite park that I stopped at six years ago, actually seven years ago. The airstream will be parked at La Mesa RV Park. I’ll work with the park owners on updating their current web image, photographing the park, photographing their new amenities and also documenting all of the activities in the area. Hopefully with this first client under my belt I’ll be adding new clients on a regular basis as I travel the country.

This idea was hatched action July traveling to my father’s house from West Virginia. As I traveled the highways heading to Sutton Massachusetts to spend a week I found that I had a difficult time finding RV parks to stay overnight on the way. Basically I was annoyed. So while in New England I called a few old friends at RV parks and asked them how valuable their web presence was to getting traffic. What I found overall from all those that I spoke with was at their websites were in fact very important to their marketing to today’s RV’ers. Unfortunately for most RV parks their web presence is still stuck 15 years behind today’s technology. Today’s RV’ers  are much more technologically savvy than they were just a few years ago. Think about it, they’ve got IPads, IPhones, Androids, Laptops, and more. They’re all traveling is now.

So why are the parks not pushing their web presence better. They depend on publication travel guidebooks and recommendations. They’ve got these fancy websites but the websites aren’t appealing. That’s for my new business idea comes.

The whole concept behind what I’m going to be working on over the next few is mobilizing the websites of RV parks. That means better presence for travelers. Time and time again on this trip alone I have had a hard time finding parks to stay on while traveling west. My GPS has been missing more than half the parks I’ve passed. Is that because Garmin made a mistake or is that because the RV parks are not making themselves known for today’s digital technology? I’m not sure of the answer.

Well that’s it for now.  We will see how well Dragon Dictate translates this voice to text. I’ll probably do another post this evening on top of this one just do it the regular way keyboard. But like the RV park owners and I’m going to meet I’m going to have to learn and adapt as well so maybe this will be new way to create my blog posts.