Welcome to On Sunday Morning. I’m the voice behind the blog and the person behind the camera. I’m an eager explorer, wannabe writer, capable chef, creative conversationalist, aging athlete, and proficient photographer. Queer in its original meaning is an apt adjective to describe me. I even have a day job working in healthcare. Social media is making us sad; let’s go for a walk somewhere together or trade tales around a campfire.
"I'm a big believer in winging it. I'm a big believer that you're never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I'm always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary."
My house is a two room brick structure surrounded by concrete with with a tin roof. It has intermittent electricity, and there’s no wi-fi to be found. So how do I manage to blog from my rural Rwandan village?
Here’s what I have in the way of technology:
a simple laptop, case, and charger
SIM card for buying mobile data bundles
a smartphone I bought in Rwanda
a USB to micro-USB cord
Gone are the days of firing up the laptop, connecting wireless-ly to the cloud, and writing while also uploading and editing photos. Gone are the days of having 10 tabs open at once. After some months of trial and error, these are the steps I now take to produce one blog post:
Charge the laptop fully either while having electricity or at the health center.
Draft and edit blog posts at night in a Word doc.
Plug phone or storage drive into laptop and grab images for said blog post.
Walk 4 miles (uphill both ways –no snow–) with laptop, cell phone, and USB drive into Huye, go to the nicest Catholic boarding house around [or second option a coffee shop with spotty wi-fi], buy a Fanta or milkshake depending on my location, add mobile data to my phone, and take a seat.
Set up a hotspot
Copy and paste posts onto WordPress, upload photos and add tags. I usually upload a month of posts at a time and set the to auto post every Sunday.
I can, and have, written and published many posts entirely through my phone. I prefer to type on a computer for quantity and quality writing.
This set up works OK… Not great…Not perfect but it gets the job done. I for one will be glad to returning to the land of Starbucks and free wi-fi sooner rather than later.
I have just tried some computer updates and all my content from my blog has disappeared.
Inhale….Exhale…Keep everything in perspective…
I am on with live chat as I type.
10 Years! That’s how far content went back on Adventure Adikt. I hope it’s not gone forever.
Adventures through 50+ countries. Adventures in going back to school. Moving adventures (and more moving). Hiking adventures. Adventures with friends. Solo adventures.
I completely changed in the last 10 years. I hardly recognize that person who landed in Italy in early February 2006. She changed.
20-something Michelle celebrating a birthday in Rome
A lot. Hopefully for the better.
I’ve changed careers. Twice. I’ve traveled a lot more. I’ve loved. And lost.
I know more about ‘balance’. I think I’ve learned how to put things in perspective.
In my early 20’s, life was all about following some predetermined life path set up by society. I may have failed miserably on following the predictable path that went college—>marriage—->career—->house—->children, but I have definitely succeeded on following MY path. It went something like this college–>travel—>more college—>Career 1—>more college—->more travel—>even more travel–>more college—>Career 2—>more travel. I hope I can continue to learn and travel for the rest of my life. If I find love, that’s great, but I’m not counting on it.
I think I’m a better person than I was 10 years ago. I like to think that I am able to keep perspective in all areas of life. If I have to start over, well, there’s no time like the present.
I welcomed Kaos into my life almost immediately upon returning from my adventures in South America
I lost my first blog of substance to the internet ghosts in July 2016. For a while I was undecided if I wanted to continue writing. After all, no one reads blogs any more. People are gravitating to social media like instagram and snapchat. People like short videos. I’m not sure a video of me will ever see the light of day. I’ve kept journals my entire life and when I started blogging on the internet in 2004 it seemed like an extension of that. Most people who read what I wrote I knew in real life. I never really thought about strangers caring what I had to say. And when they did, they were so nice. This was before internet trolls were huge, and keyboard warriors still hid in the basement and didn’t target blogs. The early 2000s were tumultuous, but I finally achieved a little stability when I moved to Durham and started a career in healthcare (pediatrics even). For the first time in my life, I felt free to make my own decisions and go where I wanted to go. My first stop was Italy and travel waxed and waned over the next 10 years, but I covered a lot of ground in North and South America and Europe. At the tail end of 2015, I began a new career as a registered nurse.
I also started feeling life was stale. I changed careers because it was ugh. My long term partner and I were also ugh. I didn’t love where I lived, but didn’t know where else to go. Is this what they talk about when they say mid-life crisis. My friends were getting married and having kids and I wanted no part of that life. I did a lot of back and forth and really cemented the decision that no-I don’t want to have kids. It’s just not something I’ve ever thought about and now firmly ensconced in my 30’s, I’m comfortable with that decision. I don’t know that I will ever get the urge to settle down, get married, and establish roots. Maybe I’m just wired differently.
I decided to create this version of my blog because 6 months of no writing feels weird to me. I’ve been able to recover some random posts. I also kept a paper journal during the last 10 years so I can recreated some of my past posts–especially travel related ones. I took a class in creative non fiction and while to stay true to the CNF genre, one is supposed to write about factual events. I created a fictional character based on an amalgam of several people and followed her life for a few years. It’s realistic enough that it could be mistaken for truth. All this to say, I still like writing, and taking pictures, and traveling. And meeting people. And I don’t like the predictability of ‘regular life.’
I mean, do you? Africa is pretty big so we’d have to narrow down exactly where to go, but I am pretty sure I could probably make it happen by Friday
