Cody’s Road Trips is always a work in progress. There’s the process of figuring out what readers want, trying to manage it within a work-life balance, finding the means to make its operation an affordable one, and finding ways to make it more appealing.

Since this website is more of a side thing than a primary one, this gets put aside in the back burner when more important things, such as work assignments, come up. Rest assured, I still find time to get out and explore and share. Then I have to find the time to put it all into website content.

I want to thank you, reader, for visiting and enjoying what all this website has to offer. There’s much more coming soon, and maybe one day there will be some sort of timely structure to it all. Today is not that day, however. I recently finished posting about my three-day trip to the Lake Michigan shore between Chicago and Milwaukee, about a month after actually going on it. On top of work, I had some health issues that have slowed things down. Speaking of health issues, I’m now dealing with a foot problem that is going to sideline me for Memorial Day weekend, so unfortunately I’m going to stay at home for the next few days.

I wanted to let you in on a few things and updates that are underway with the website, and some trips I have planned in the future.

A master road trips list is in the works. This plans to encompass many of the road trips that I have taken since my early 20s; many of those trips are documented in photo album form on my Facebook page. The only issue with those is, one would need to have a Facebook profile in order to view them (all albums are public). If you have Facebook, great. If you don’t, this may not apply to you. My Facebook albums have my most-furthest-away trips documented in visual form (with short descriptions in the captions) such as Duluth, Cooperstown, Cairo, Lake Itasca (the Mississippi River headwaters) and much more. The plan is to link to certain starting points of highlighted places within each album, and let readers scroll forward from there.

The master road trips list will be on this website’s Alpha List of trips. Currently, towns and cities on that list link to content that was written simply for this website, whether it is a full feature or simply mentioned on a compilation piece. The inclusion of the Facebook photo album listing will make that alpha list much larger, but each link will specify whether a featured place is 1) a “featured post” on this website, 2) a “Facebook album excerpt” from my personal Facebook page, or 3) links to articles I have written for Shaw Media’s magazine publications. The eventual goal is to have items 2 and 3 become integrated into “featured post” content in an effort to provide something fresh on a regular basis, giving you more than the tiny amount of information that is provided on those Facebook albums.

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I recently purchased a Pro Package on the photo storage website Flickr to store unlimited photos from trips. The cost is $75/year for that. Together with the WordPress package of website material (which you are currently looking at), it’s around $100/year. I’m fine with that, it comes within my personal entertainment budget (as do the trips themselves). Flickr allows captions on each photo, and may have a greater worldwide audience than this website and my Facebook page, so I’m pleased with that. I’m not sure if Flickr utilizes hashtags, and that could make the outreach a little greater, but make the captions look a little clunky); I’ll look into that. The Flickr photo album can be viewed by clicking here.

The upcoming issue that I need to figure out when it comes to pictures is storage space within WordPress. The package I have only allows for a fixed amount of storage space, and I figure to reach all of that at some point. That may necessitate deletion of some of this website’s pre-Road Trips posts (personal stuff, baseball cards, etc.) and a website package upgrade ($$$). To be determined.

One thing I can do right now with having Flickr is to establish an idea I have for “Road Trip Random,” a collection of places I’ve recently visited that may not necessitate a large, featured post about it, but are interesting sights. This would include neat looking yard art, weird things, punny places, and whatever else that fits the term “potpourri.”

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As previously mentioned, I had some health setbacks that have grounded me from going on more road trips in the past month. As of this writing, the one trip on my current “To-Do” list is that of the National Farm Toy Museum in Dyersville, Iowa, where I visited in late March. Some of the trips on my radar include day trips around Peoria and Springfield, part of the Southland area of the Chicago suburbs, a Part II of my recent “Chicwaukee” trip, and a family-based trip somewhere close to home. Then again, something else completely different may pop up, you never know.

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A short reminder that any advertisements you see on this page are not my idea. They come with the WordPress package I pay for, and are entirely a WordPress thing. I don’t get paid by them.

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Promoting this website so far has largely been accomplished by social media sharing on my Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter) accounts. If you see something you like, and want to share on your social media, please feel free to do that – you never know if you may inspire someone to explore the region a little more, and they could find something profound to them.

If you REALLY like what you see, this website has a subscription feature where you can receive email updates about new posts to this website (and you can forward those via email to others as well!). Click HERE for more information on how to sign up. It’s completely free! New posts come whenever I get around to them.

I also welcome suggestions to help make this website better. Sometimes I may utilize your idea, if time allows. Comments can be made at the bottom of each post, or emailed to me (link in the About Me part of this website).

It’s always a work in progress, and I enjoy that.

Thank you for reading!