This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.
This time it is my good friend, Rein Krevald, the crazy Estonian! One heck of an athlete, and also a heck of a writer. Here he writes about his writing about some really adventurous trips.
"Adventure writing - hmm, what does that really mean? I think the word adventure has a slightly different meaning for everyone. One man’s day-to-day activities are another man’s adventure. For me, it started out with journaling my travels to and from snow skiing destinations in the US and Canada, some of the finest ski areas that North America has to offer and my skiing exploits in Wyoming’s back country.
So how did technology come into play? Well, I did some heli-skiing in British Columbia (like in the video below). But in terms of writing - I wouldn’t have even started if it wasn’t for some major changes in technology. Somewhere around the mid 90’s I started bringing a laptop with me on my ski adventures. In prior years my only form of contact with friends and folks back home was an occasional post card or phone call. Lo and behold, the Internet and email allowed me to write some pretty detailed accounts of my escapades in the mountains. I discovered that I really enjoyed writing about them and to my amazement, there were a lot of folks out there that enjoyed reading them. Before I knew it, I had a fairly large email distribution that was reading and commenting on my literary genius - a slight overstatement :)
Over the course of the next several years, I went out west skiing and kept myself and a host of friends, acquaintances, and stragglers I picked up along the way entertained with my musings. As a matter of fact, several of my readers strongly urged me to write a book about my adventures. Every time I tried to write the book, the cynic in me won out.
Till 2007.
People were still bugging me to write a book. From out of the blue I came up with the idea of camping, hiking, and mountain climbing with my dog, Spanky. We could travel around from state to state and hit the highest summit in every state. All I needed was a couple of hours of research, Googleing (there’s the technology thing) the heck out of a host of topics and I determined that the idea actually had legs.
With all the tools I had available - laptop, MS Streets and Trips, hand held GPS, a digital camera, mobile phone - my canine buddy and I were set to go in no time at all. Technology allowed easy access to recommended places to camp, trail maps and trail hints and recommendations, weather info, and gear recommendations and we were well prepared for each day.
Most days required a bit of driving. I used that time to record the day’s events on a digital voice recorder. In the evening I transcribed my voice notes into Word. Next time I will try a voice recorder like Nuance while I am driving - if I train it with the ambient driving noise, I hope it is smart enough to make appropriate adjustments.
Out of all technologies, the growing Wi-Fi availability in campgrounds had the most impact on writing the book. After a day of hiking and climbing, Spanky and I would cook dinner over a camp stove, sit around a campfire for a while, and then I would get on the laptop. Typically I needed to do some research on the area; history, geology, other significant facts. The old fashioned way would have had me spending countless hours in libraries, buying books, reading and researching for some tiny tidbit of information.
Lest I forget, another form of communication, totally enabled by technology, the Blog! I immediately started a blog using Google’s free Blogger (not the most advanced tool but free!). The idea was to post a summary accounting of our adventure in every state, with pictures of course, and build up interest and a readership ultimately for the book project. I started out by emailing a fairly large network of friends to let them know when updates were posted. No, many of them have not heard of RSS feeds :) Google Analytics has allowed me to easily keep track of blog activity – to date we’ve had visits from 69 countries – not bad for a guy and his dog.
After somewhere around 20,000 miles of driving, countless cups of coffee, lots of beef jerky, on the go lunches, untold miles of hiking and climbing, my dog Spanky and I managed to bag 24 state summits/highpoints (my trips in the 90s had taken me to most Western states)
And we had 300 pages – enough to get a book out the door. With Adobe Acrobat Pro converting a Word document to PDF format is a piece of cake. Most of today’s electronic printing processes primarily print from PDF files.
Can’t have a book without a cover - so did I hire a pro and spend a bunch of money? No way. I’ve got a bunch of digital photos, at least one of them can be used as a cover photo – artwork done! Decide on some text, choose a few colors and I’ve got the cover figured out. I visited a few local printers and found that Adobe InDesign was the way to go to design the cover and create a print ready PDF file.
Finally, time to print. I shopped around on the internet and found a competitively priced printer that would turn the books around quickly. All I had to do was log on to their web site, upload my text and cover files, and voila, printed books 48 hours later! That is pretty amazing!
Technology influenced the whole process of traveling around the eastern US, camping, hiking, and climbing with my dog, writing about it, getting all my stuff into publishable format, printing and publishing a book - all in less than one year.
That’s about it, oh yeah, a shameless plug for our blog
The Adventures of Spanky and Rein
Hope you enjoy our blog, and maybe even our book, as much as we enjoyed the adventure. One of these days I would like to finish the remaining 26 states and get a second book out the door. Your ideas on the summits and of course technologies we can employ would make that journey even more enjoyable.”
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