Our Blogging Year in Review {2022}
View from Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park in West Virginia
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As we close out 2022, we are coming up on our four year anniversary of To Make Much of Time! It’s hard to believe we’ve been at it almost four years! Who has the (dripping with sarcasm) good fortune to start a travel blog one year before a global pandemic hits?! Of course, our blog isn’t only about travel - our tagline is “a blog about travel, life, and the pursuit of the unknown” and 2022 gave us plenty to experience and write about in all facets.
We hit the milestone of 100,000 page views several months ago and by the end of 2022, we’ll have written over 220 different posts in our blog’s lifetime. Of course behind the stats are the travels and life experiences that provide fodder and those are what spur us to write.
This year, we created sections on our website to delineate adventures in travel, adventures in reading, and adventures in life, and here are some of this year’s highlights in each category.
Adventures in travel
After a two and a half year travel hiatus (thanks, covid), we finally ventured out in late August and spent four days at Watoga State Park in West Virginia, where we stayed in a rustic cabin built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corp. We were happy to be able to bring our three dogs with us. Check out the trip overview here. It was enough to get me salivating over more traveling, and we already have three trips booked for 2023 (keep reading for more about those).
While the trips are not new ones, we finally got around to blogging about our 9-day Great Lakes Road Trip (read here) and a 4-day trip to Coastal Maine (read here) and enjoyed rediscovering the memories and photos.
Local travel is still travel, and we had a chance to check out and write about several hikes in our local area of Roanoke, Virginia, and started a post to track and link to all local hike posts we have written about (read here).
adventures in reading
After blowing my annual reading goal out of the water in 2021 with 103 books read, I was just confident enough to think I could hit 100 books again this year. Nope. But I’ll probably end the year with about 75. The vast majority didn’t make it into blog reviews, but I did manage to write seven of those this year. Most notably, my favorite Icelandic author, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, published her newest work, Animal Life (read review here), and Mohsin Hamid published his latest, The Last White Man (read review here).
I continue to be attracted to - as well as to attract authors of - books about Appalachia, the local region. One book sent to me as an advanced copy by an unpublished author was epically bad - we’re talking all sorts of political dog whistles, incoherent and inconsistent characters, and no-holds-barred racism and misogyny - so needless to say, that ended up in my short pile of books I’ve not finished in my lifetime. I am happy to get the chance to connect with new authors and support them where I can, but that does mean occasionally spending my time with something that is a big pile of yikes. On the flip side, I read Bobi Conn’s fantastic book set in Appalachia called A Woman in Time (read review here).
I didn’t read enough truly good books this year to justify a best books of 2022 list so am taking a one-year hiatus but plan on bringing that back in 2023 with increased intentional reading.
Several books I read as advanced reading copies will be published in 2023, so consider pre-ordering these books to get started on your book pile for the year and to support their authors:
Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Murder, Madness, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint by Lee Durkee - To be published April 2023 (read our review here)
Where Coyotes Howl by Sandra Dallas - To be published April 2023 (read our review here)
adventures in life
Well, we’re certainly one (baby) step closer to off-grid living than we were a year ago. This year we embarked upon making our own soap and beeswax candles, both of which are remarkably easy and fun. We’ve made two full batches of soap and are currently rendering cooking fat for our next couple of batches. You can read more here about our soap-making and candle-making experiments.
And our biggest news of the year was purchasing over 130 acres of mountain land - views for miles! - for recreational use (read about that here). So far, we have used it for hiking and have built a preliminary campsite and storage shed/outhouse, and we have plans for the year(s) ahead to tackle a do-it-yourself cabin. Hmm maybe our attempt at gingerbread house making this winter is a good way to practice building a cabin. Or maybe not.
what’s in store for 2023?
Hey, if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the future is what it will be. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a plan. Thank goodness. I live for plans.
We have three fully planned and booked trips. We are still playing it safe on the covid-front and so are going places that are more rural/outdoorsy (eh, that’s mostly our jam anyway) and via car instead of plane.
- Breaks Interstate Park - Part of the Virginia state park system, we almost overlooked this one entirely because of its unappealing name (interstate?!). It turns out this interstate refers to the fact that the park is along the Virginia-Kentucky border, and it looks absolutely stunning. We'll be staying in a cabin and enjoying the great outdoors. Conveniences of civilized life are not nearby, a price we will gladly pay by bringing our own groceries.
- West Virginia - We're returning to the state for a second year running but this time to to explore areas like the New River Gorge and Seneca Rocks.
- And the year's magnum opus: a two-week road trip that will be primarily in New Brunswick, Canada, with visits to two Canadian National Parks - Fundy National Park and Kouchibouguac National Park. But because of the long distance getting there, will include a number of side stops: Concord, Massachusetts (my heart will be filled in the stomping grounds of Emerson, the Alcotts, and Thoreau); Bangor, Maine; and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Thank you for joining us on this adventure, and we look forward to sharing more in 2023!
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