After Eleven Years It's Time to End the Travelog

When we started off on this travel adventure back in February of 2000 we began this travelog without any idea as to what it would be like, how long it would last, or even how long we would be on the road. Mostly it was just our own private journal, an add-on so to speak, to "Stringbean.com a wholly owned subsidiary of Stringbeans International" a family website which we had been playing with for years. It was also a way for our kids to keep up with where we were and what we were doing.

We were constantly on the move, traveling all around the Country. There was lots to do and see and write about. Entries to the Travelog were frequent, often daily. As time went on the the travelog improved considerably, both in content and format, photographs were added and gradually became more numerous.

With the passage of time we began to have more readers—people we did not know but who had discovered our Travelog and were following our travels. We received e-mail from many of them, have met and become friends with some of them. During the summer of 2002 when we were traveling in Alaska the Travelog was getting over 4,000 hits per month!

In 2007 we spent the summer exploring Newfoundland and Labrador. It was a great summer and a trip well worth doing. As that summer came to an end we headed south, back to the United States and warmer weather. Seeing that there was a FamCamp at Hanscom AFB, only two miles off of I-95, that seemed to be a place we were meant to stay at—so we did. We obviously liked it there as we ended up staying for a month (that was a VERY long time for us to stay in one place). While we were there we got a job offer to "co-host" at the FamCamp the following summer. Hanscom FamCamp is open May 1 through October 31 and when we got there shortly before May 1 the following spring what was supposed to have been a co-hosting job turned out to be a little different; Sharyn became the manager of the FamCamp while I describe myself as grass cutter and toilet bowl cleaner.

Anyway, we both like the jobs (they are paid positions) , the FamCamp itself, the surrounding area (Bedford Massachusetts), and the people we work for. That's why we will be going back this spring for our fourth year. As a result of these jobs we have now fallen into a pattern of spending six months in the summer at Hanscom, then spending the winters at the MacDill AFB FamCamp in Tampa. It's a pretty good arrangement—in fact, we don't know how to beat it, so it looks as if we will continue it.

Therein lies the problem with the Travelog. We no longer travel, and when we are not traveling it is difficult to write a travelog, or, in fact, to write anything interesting at all. The "interest quotient" (if there is such a term) has diminished greatly over the past several years. It has become like "A Day in the Lives of Sharyn and Phil." Really uninteresting. And much more difficult to write.

Accordingly, having considered it several times in the past, the time is now. Everything comes to an end at some point—something else may happen with stringbean.com—but there will be no Travelog 2011.

Thanks for following us all these years,
Sharyn & Phil




NOTE: As of March 4, 2011 we have decided to continue the "Travelog" as a "Journal."
Continue on to Journal 2011



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Complete Travelog February 2000 through December 31, 2010
(This is a big file, probably not suitable for download via dialup connection)