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.A new blog. We are making a new start in so many other ways, it is also time for me to make a new blog to go with our new adventures. Having sold Rock Springs Guest Ranch last fall, we began dreaming about what we would most like to do with our lives. We decided to go about things a little backward from the usual line of thinking: beginning with the end and building towards it, rather than the typical assessment of our saleable skills and looking for opportunities that best fit those. So, we are finding ourselves climbing a steep learning curve, which is incredibly exciting, if a little unnerving.
After 20 years for myself and 25 years for John doing basically the same thing, the last few years felt like ground hog day. We found ourselves often saying, haven’t we been here before? Negotiating the latest struggle between employees, rethinking and rewriting the staff housing policy, listening to the department head who is looking over the fence at someone else’s department and criticizing, and rebuilding the real fences. Everything we did, built, or mended would come full circle and repeat themselves over time. So, with a world of possibility open to us, it was time to leap.
Our hope and dream is to go walkabout. We love to travel, but with our business we couldn’t be gone for more than a week or two, and never during the summer. Nonetheless, we have been able to see several countries on a few continents. Currently, our dream is to wrap things up here, and sometime early in 2010 leave the country for parts unknown, and not return for a year, or maybe a year and a half.
Obviously, there are several hurdles between here and there. Not the least of which is income. Fortunately, we were able to personally buy shares of Rock Springs Guest Ranch, LLC over the years, and the sale of the ranch has given us some buffer, at least for the time being. Certainly, however, we cannot retire at this point.
This leads us to our latest venture. Our hope is to create a business that is fully portable. Two months ago, we started an online travel magazine, with stories of travel both written and in audio podcasts, photo galleries, and soon we’ll be adding video content, as well. I have made the leap to webmaster, writer, and photographer. John is still wrapping up some things with the Rock Springs Guest Ranch land the LLC still owns to get it ready to sell, and lagging a bit behind me in learning his new video editing software. Hopefully, as we are able to add content, traffic will increase, and we will be able to sell online advertising on the site. Our address is www.gilladventures.com.
Some of what you will find on the site now are a good representation of the type of travel stories and photo galleries we plan to continue to add. Recently added stories are Barre de Potosi; A Road Less Traveled, which talks about staying in a small fishing village in Mexico, complete with barefoot children playing in the dirt streets, immediately followed by a sanitized Mexico experience in Ixtapa at Club Med where Spanish is seldom heard. Another is about a trip to Chilean Patagonia, where we were flooded out and evacuated from of Torres del Paine National Park. Recently added image galleries include Les Trois Vallees ski area in France, Izu Oshima Island in Japan, and the Alvord Desert and Hot Springs in Southeast Oregon.
And so, I am starting a new blog to go along with the new website, this being my first post. The blog dude ranch name does not work for us anymore, as we are no longer dude ranchers; our new blog will be within our new website. I hope some of my old readers from blogduderanch.com will join me as we explore our world.
