Welcome to My Memory!

 

I enjoy traveling, but as I get older my memory gets worse. To combat this, I like to write down my experiences, mostly for my own benefit.  However, I can't write without thinking about an audience, so here you go!

This site began in 2016, which I documented our tour and cruise in Alaska.  From there, I began to fill-in both new and older trips.  A couple of times (most recently in May 2026) I migrated to new Blogger themes, which means that some older trips might still have (now useless) footers directing you to "click on menus" (now gone).  The May 2026 move was much more extensive, because I converted all my writings from static web pages to blog posts.  Not by choice, mind you - I had to do this because I hadn't been aware when I first started that Blogger capped the number of pages at somewhere between 100-200 page.  Grr.  So I spent a weekend doing a lot of cutting and pasting, but also some formatting cleanup, too.

So, who are we?  I (Doug) and my wife (Eileen, usually shortened to E in postings) have - as of May 2026 - been married 29 years and have two sons.  The oldest works at the Board of Elections for Polk County and is living with his wife in Des Moines, IA (where she's a zookeeper at Blank Park Zoo) and our younger is about to be a senior at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he's finishing up a BA in Music.  

We really focused a lot on traveling with the boys (beyond our annual camping and Bodega Bay trips) starting in 2015 when the boys were 15 and 10 years old and we figured they'd BOTH remember the "big trips", as we realized that our window of being able to travel as a family was sadly short.  Hence various trips to Europe, big cruises, and other destinations.  

Following our retirements in 2018, E and I continued our travels with each other.  We've taken a number of cruises through this period.  While we do not think that a cruise is the BEST vacation - our European trips generally are better - we've certainly found our cruises to be the most RELAXING vacations so we've continued to do them through the years.

We live in San Jose, California, where we remain heavily involved with the technical side  community theater, which is how we met in our mid-20s.  

This site is using the (free) Tungsten theme for Blogger.