During my trek around the Annapurna Circuit with Room to Read I picked up the trail name "Hoov". After a week on the trek as the ten of us were finishing up lunch, John Wood, founder of Room to Read, observed that I was just like a Hoover Vacuum cleaner by sucking up all of the leftover food at most of our meal stops. From that day on, my fellow Trekkers called me "Hoov". I continued with that trail name when I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail that runs from Mexico to Canada.
Here I am at the summit of 17,769 foot Throng La Pass after starting this trek at Besi Sahar at an altitude of 2,700 feet. While in Nepal, we visited eight schools and libraries that Room to Read helped villagers build.
As of March 2012, Room to Read has opened over 13,170 libraries with 10 million local language books which includes 707 different self published local language books in 27 languages across 10 countries. R2R now has 13,726 girls on long-term scholarships and has opened 1,592 schools benefitting 6 million children. if you are interested in learning more about R2R, or donating, tell them "Hoov" sent you. here is their link: www.roomtoread.org .
John Wood, founder of R2R reading to students in Simle, Nepal just before our trek.
I could not figure out how to upload my pictures in my iPad to my blog so I googled the question and discovered that you could not do it directly by dragging, dropping, or copy/pasting. Instead you had to upload your pictures to Picasa or Flickr. While doing this research, I continued to read about an app called "Blogsy" that helped bloggers with improved ways of setting up your blog, especially with being able to easily insert your pictures through your narratives. Yesterday I installed the "Blogsy" app into my iPad and have been reading the instructions and watching their videos.It all looks very easy, but I first needed to upload some pictures to Picasa. But before I did that, I emailed "Blogsy" company to see if instead, they got a fix to avoid uploading my photos to Picasa. I got an answer from Lance Barton, the CEO, within 10 minutes. He said that I understood correctly that they now cannot do it, but if they can figure out how, they will make that change. Great customer service. Now on to experiment by adding some pictures and perhaps a video.
UPDATEBlogsy is no more. They stopped because they could not keep up with the frequent Apple OS updates. I now just use Blogger for creating my blog entries. Good luck.
I just got this first picture imported. I am in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia at a rice terrace world heritage site. when you enter Hindu temples, as a sign of respect you wear a sarong and sash.
The public art is in Valaparaiso, Chile.
Here is a video from my travels to Bolivia during the last revolt in April/May 2005.
That's all for now.
Hoov
Pacific Crest Trail Near Kendell Kat Walk, August 2011.
This is the first time I have created a blog. I am using the Google Blogger system since the price is right--free. I plan to use it to chronicle my upcoming trip to Brazil from April 11th to May 26th. In previous travels I used a small notebook to journal my activities, keep track of expenses and make various notes to myself. I also sent off emails to my family back home which then ended up forwarded to others. [Note Blogger no longer works and I now use Google's Blogger with its improvements.]
On my last trip to Japan, Bali, and Thailand I took my new iPad2 and got familiar with some of its features, especially the ability to easily email off short video clips and photos along with my email.
For this trip, I was planning to journal on my iPad, but then I thought I might as well try out the blogger systems that I have read about during the time I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, plus seeing other blogs like the French guy who went around the world in his Land cruiser or the couple who first drove their VW camper van from the US down through Central and South America and on through Africa. They also followed it up with a bicycle ride through Asia where I recently met them at Suk 11 hostel in Bangkok.
Before I leave the US, I want to test out how to do this so this is why I am doing this entry. I will also try it using my iPad2 to figure out how to upload my pictures and videos to this blog. So the learning begins.
