Where is Ramble John 9/15/2019

We completed the mini tour with a month stay in South Bend, Indiana, another month in Peoria, Illinois, and a couple weeks in St Louis, Missouri before returning to Columbus for awhile. We are planning to hang out here until the first week of November, head back to St Louis for a couple more weeks, and then head some place warmer for the winter. Most likely we will end up someplace in the huge state of Texas but at this point we have not decided where would be fun.

Recent changes in the site

Wow, after goofing off for over a year completing 2010 I have managed to complete our 2011 account in just over three months. That was about the average for my first four years but also rather ambitious adding 29 pages to the 200 I already had and over 750 photographs to bring the total over 3600. As a quick check look at the 2011 Pages tab and if you don't see cities like Cairo, Illinois or Nashville, Tennessee your browser is holding some old files that need to be cleared.

Thanks again to Thinkful.com I got directed into learning enough JavaScript, mostly from NetNinja on U-tube, to be dangerous. Now I can add pages and only add a few lines to my script file rather than having to change the menus on all 200+ pages which was a major pain. You now need to have JavaScript enabled to jump around the site but that is required for most modern websites. Actually the pages load a little more quickly since most browsers load the JavaScript once and hold it to fill in the menus on each page. Of course I did find our friend Bill knows we want to load my JavaScript once and never ever do any updates so there is no need to ever refresh the script. If things look a little weird and some 2011 pages seem to be missing from the menu try clearing the browsing history and it should clear up. As before the site allows you to jump from any page to any page and possibly get totally lost in the process so I also created a little feature that links outside my site are shown in the traditional blue, links within my site are shown green, and sites or pages you have already visited are shown in red. That part is also stored in your browser history and gets wiped out if you need to do a refresh.

I have also started a campaign to provide direct links to each page listed in the text even going back to the older portions when I finally get the referenced page created. I also tweaked the menu bars so the text remains readable when you mouse over, duh!. Lastly and not obvious is starting to add search keywords to the pages as I update them for some nefarious purpose that may be helpful in the future. Another real pain is exercising all the links since the internet is dynamic and pages do move, get renamed, or just evaporate. If you want to see how weird things can get access the Albuquerque page with Chrome and it will probably have all bold text. If I change the page name by a single letter it displays normally. I keep hoping Google will fix the problem so I don't have to search out and replace all the references. And you wonder why web designers have grey hair.

This site is planed as a work in progress. After retiring in 2006, we started sending reports back to the wonderful lady that had always watched the house while we traveled. Unfortunately Ruth Lambert is no longer with us so the major incentive for the reports is also gone and sending color copies to all our friends and relatives does start to get rather expensive hence this more convenient website presentation. As in our rambling, the reporting tended to be rather erratic and although it only got into 2010 it was reaching 300 pages and filling two 2 inch notebooks. With the old stuff converted that puts me now only eight years behind but year six of our travels is now complete and I can start working on 2012.

About Us

We retired in mid 2006 and decided to wander the USA to actually see what it really looks like. In some 40 years of actually working for a living John has had extensive travel but rare opportunities to see an area. Usually it's dark going into the plant and dark coming out so most of the scenery is the inside of a plant, motel room, or restaurant. Actually in the last six months before retirement John put in two 34 hour days; ya walk into the plant and walk out 34 hours later. So we sold the house and the majority of the "stuff" and are now OLD (medicare recipients), UNEMPLOYED (Social Security recipients), HOMELESS (not destitute), and enjoying the nomad lifestyle. NO! we don't have an RV; we sold the house, we're not driving it. We have two tents to camp when we want, but mostly motel camp. Staying a week or a month tends to be economical most places and we are definitely budget travelers. Look for us where its warm but not real hot with a reasonable cost of living. Actually we are starting to run out of those places and running into some of the more expensive places.