About the Web Site

I started putting together these pages as a 40th Birthday Present for my Brother on the 20th anniversary of our Ride. Rest Assured that it was something that I had wanted to do for quite a long time. I had typed in the journal from our trip on a mainframe computer way back in 1983, so the electrons that you are reading are really quite old in computer terms.

They started in a program on the Franklin Institues DEC 20 using the SED (Screen EDitor) program. It was amazing you could type the letters on the screen and see them as they went into the file. This was an improvement over the previous text program called LED (Line EDitor), and unbelievable when compared to the data entry with punch cards that was still in use at many college computer centers. You can see how original the program names were.

I have carried them along ever since, importing them into new programs and computers as the years have passed. I thought that I had a big head start since the journal was pretty much ready to go. I had reformatted it in Word and added proper headings and a table of contents in 2002.

I started by buying a new scanner, a nice but inexpensive Microtek 4800. I had hoped that this would save a lot of time; It didn't! I ended up scanning the pictures at a much higher resolution. The end result is a nice set of pictures on a CD for Marc, but just as much or more time scanning the photographs.

In fact the scanning of the photographs, maps and tour guides we collected during the ride took an incredible amount of time, much more then I had expected. Of course the first problem was finding everything. I had the journal and I had a scrap book that I had made when we got home in 1983, but I couldn't find the pictures or any of the other paraphernalia (stuff) that we had saved from the trip. I spent a good part of March going through boxes of pictures looking for and organizing things.

Then I had to figure out how to lay out the web pages. I had made up site in 2002 after our trip to Seattle with the camper, so I had some idea of what I had to do. But I wanted to do more with this site then the one I made last year.

I started manually making up pages to arrange the photos, but I didn't have enough lifetimes to do that, instead I used Adobe Photoshop Elements to stitch together the index pages for the photos, then I did some editing and linking to try to make the site look a bit more cohesive. The backgrounds are either photos from the trip that have been edited for use as a background, or collages made from maps, business cards and advertisements that we collected on our trip.

I used Word to create the html text, then I pasted the basic text into a file that I used as an html template for the for the journal pages. In the word document, I had a made a table of contents, which worked nicely to make the contents page for the journal. It may be overkill, but it was pretty easy to make from the results of the Word-html conversion.

For the last section, the mileage log; I imported the log from the Word Journal Document and I used Excel to create the table. I deleted most of the Formating from Excel and put the table into another file that I used as a template.

I tried to keep the design of the pages simple, but interesting. I hope that you find it so. If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you. Send your email to jdear97 at att.net. Please read the -at- as an @ and leave out the spaces. You would be amazed at how quickly the spammers grabbed the email address when I put it in a mailto: tag

Have a great Day!!

JDD