The Long Drive

After five days on the road, Nancy and the kids finally reached Canada today! Maybe soon I can get back to a "normal" pattern of life without them here. God really blessed us so that she did not have to drive through any snow. Shortly after her arrival the next storm system is forecast to give some snow accumulation, before it warms up nicely.

So now that my family is about to settle in up north and my father-in-law is feeling a lot better, I suppose it's about time to start considering new stuff to blog about. I know there is some confusion about where the name for the blog came from. If you know me at all (and you may not), the "adventure" part is probably pretty self-explanatory. Basically I like to go places and do things, especially if it's new to me. "Tejano" comes from my identification with growing up in a heavily Hispanic part of Texas. The "safari" part is just a Swahili reiteration of my insatiable travel appetite, since my birth in Kenya has always helped to foster my interest in far away places, languages, and people. So that's how the name came about.

Unfortunately, helping Nancy out with her little adventure up to New Brunswick lately has got the travel bug running full force through my veins again. In particular, a little project that I started the last time that we went to Canada really came in handy yesterday, when I was scrambling to find a motel room for them. Since we always have trouble finding reasonably priced accommodations in the Northeast, I had put together a map of Maine with hyperlinks to motels in each town. Right now I'm really wanting to make that database more complete, partly for our trip back down in a couple months and partly just 'cause I get so interested in all the places there are to stay.

I especially want to have more documentation of the independent family-owned motels that are usually not so easy to find out about, in many cases are cheaper, and often are struggling to compete with the big boys. I think that what I have could be a valuable product to be able to sell, even in its currently very simple form, but I can't currently see being able to make this happen by myself. I can't put the draft version online for free use either, since I would first have to get permission from the owner of the copyright on the base map that I used. It's a neat resource for me. Hopefully someday I'll be able to share it with the rest of the world.