September 26, 2008
A friend of mine is heading back to the Seattle area to finish earning a PhD, and taking the long way (automobile) to get there. On the way, my friend is seeing the sights of Flyover Country. Contrary to my own belief that my memory behaves more like a sieve than a steel trap, this is actually making me remember the road trips my scout troop took out west in 1991 and 1993.
(Lucky for you I have no travelogs for that one.)
Now the recollection isn't perfect, but there were enough waypoints (Wall Drug, Badlands National Park) for me to remember and recommend other places like the Corn Palace*, Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial (in progress since 1948). The latter two will be skipped in order to spend more time at Yellowstone, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
I have other stuff I kinda-sorta remember, but can't remember if it was on the Philmont trip in '91 or the general out-west trip in '93. Things like Bryce Canyon in Utah. I know we went to the Grand Canyon in '91 as a warm-up hike, but can't remember if we hit the other national parks in that area that year. There was also the Indian reservation we visited -- North Texas or Oklahoma, maybe? -- due to the Scoutmaster's interest in American Indian cultures. I never did figure out what the residents thought of a pair of full-size vans full of white kids just appearing for no good reason.
Not really a problem for my friend's trip though, since Utah isn't really on the way from Yellowstone to Washington.
So now I want to go through my archives and dig up pictures from those trips to jog my memory. Unfortunately the original file format ("film") isn't really in use any more and the only upgrade path ("prints") was a dead end. The formats are also very weak on meta-data, relying on manual entry for almost everything (including creation date/time). They may not even be sorted properly. This, as the kids say, is Teh Suxxors.
I suppose I could scan select pictures and store them as high-quality JPEGs but that's a lot of time and effort. I suppose I'd better do something with them though, because eventually the physical copies will deteriorate. Guess I better get on it while I still have a shot at remembering what the hell some of that stuff is.
* Yes, it's a building dedicated to proving that you can actually grow things in South Dakota. The exterior is covered in things like corn (hence the name) that are patterned into a mural, with a different one each year. This would not go over well in more cosmopolitan states, but when the last notable item on your trip was the Mississippi River and you're in a state that's six hours across, you'll take what you can get.
Update, 6:42 PM: Meh. Have to download HP's crapware so the scanner/printer will work. I'm pretty sure there's something in there that borks upgrades to OSX 10.5, but that's not on the agenda for me anyway.
Update, 9:42 PM: So much for the concept of reasonable defaults. Every picture I scanned looked like utter shit. Oh, and the so-called Photoshop files the scanner makes can't be opened in Photoshop. Apparently this is going to be more labor- (and time-) intensive than I originally thought. Sigh.
