Well, its my attempt at handcrafting a blog for my family. Over the course of a year...A YEAR...I have been playing around with different frameworks and platforms to find a way to create a blog that would be fun for me to build up over time but also usable for Laura. At first I had thought about just getting a Squarespace or Wix site and calling it good with picking out a template. There is nothing wrong with that, but it also wasn't going to give me any sense of accomplishment. I then thought about going the Wordpress route, which I did for about 5 minutes. I wasnt a big fan of the security and speed of a lot of the sites I have seen and I felt that it either held my hand too much or not enough - no good. I then needed to ask myself, "Jon, what is it that you want this site to be???". WELL...

• It needs to be a project. Not so much of one that I will never finish it but one that I can push an MVP (minimal viable product) out and increment over time. If I'm going to take a year off of work I have got to continue getting better at what I do and this is just one of those things to help make that happen.
• It cant have support for visual themes build in. Pre-built themes are great, they can quickly a website up and running but I just cant rely on it if I want to think of myself as a front-end developer.
• It needs to be fast. Aint nobody got time to sit around waiting to pictures to load.
• It needs to be simple. This one was KEY to me. It needs to have an easy to use administration panel for post creation and content editing. It also needs to be simple for guests to the site, that means an intuitive uncluttered design with no ads or popups and that has everything you want to look at no more than a few clicks away.

I went through many different design layouts because well...I'm not a designer. I hope whoever is reading this though enjoys their time here, which leads me to the why.

What can you expect to see you ask?

I'm glad you asked that. Laura and I have very different interests so that will translate well to the type of content you may find on this here blog. From myself you will quite possibly find:

• Photo essays - I'm not much of a photographer but it is in my blood...hi dad. I however do have interest in it and learning the nuances taking photos and also getting better at editing. I bought myself a entry level camera so that I wont have my phone out all of the time and some entry level lenses and we'll see where it takes me.

• Gear reviews - I have planned way way way too much into how Laura, Harrison and myself will be traveling to not have any opinion possibly worthy of writing down. I'm not much of a writer so I hope that I can improve through reviews. We have also really tried to be thoughtful of quality, budget and sustainability with what we have purchased/plan on purchasing for the trip so I'm excited to see what we come up with.
• Videos - We'll be filming along with taking photos during the trip which I'm very excited about. I haven't done much video editing in the past but both Harrison and myself are interested in getting into that as well.
• Before/during/after musing on locations. Some of the places we are going to one or two of us have gone to before but most we haven't, which is both exciting a little terrifying. I think it would be fun to share some feeling before hand of how we feel about going to a place like, Delhi for example, and compare how we feel after the time there.

Thank you for your time and support. Please leave a comment below if it interests you or send us an email at any time, we will always love to hear from you.

Happy Travels!

-Jon