Final Day. Headed home. Overnight at the Hampton Inn in La Vista, Nebraska (just outside Omaha). We love Hamptons. This was the largest we’ve been at, almost a small apartment.

In case anyone is interested, I thought you might want to know a little bit about how I handled the blogging and trip management as we went. If you’re not interested, no worries.

I took a lot of pictures on this trip. Only a few of them appeared on the blog. I used my Canon PowerShot S3IS for all the pictures. It captures 6.0 mega-pixels of data and has a 12x optical zoom. I only needed to change batteries one time on the trip, though I came prepared with three sets of batteries for quick changes. My nature photography on this trip has made me interested in learning more about working with the manual functions on my camera, but ‘most every photo I took was on the “auto” setting.

I brought along our MacBook Pro and used the following applications as we went: Safari, Quicken Essentials, iPhoto, Snapfish, WordPress (in Safari & iPhone app), and Open Office.

Every night of the trip that I was able to, I performed several tasks:

• entered credit card receipts into Quicken, so as to avoid having a huge stack to enter when we got home;
• placed the credit card receipts together, in chronological order, in a business-size envelope I brought for that purpose;
• downloaded all photos from the day from the Canon’s SD card (using my trusty hot pink card reader) to iPhoto, creating an “event” for the day;
• uploaded this “event” to Snapfish;
• placed an order in the Snapfish Shopping Cart for prints of that day’s photos;
• started a blog post in Open Office about that day’s events;
• identified those photos from the day that I would likely use for that day’s blog post, and uploaded them from iPhoto to my WordPress account; and
• edited previous day’s posts, copying and scheduling them in WordPress for one per day when completed.

When we didn’t have internet access or good reception, completing a blog post might take a few days. By drafting in Open Office, however, I could work off-line in the car while Hal drove (thank you, Hal), as well as have a copy for myself off-line, in case anything went wrong with the WordPress post. One interesting experience I noted is that I needed at least a night, if not a day or two, to reflect upon that day’s experiences and figure out what I wanted to say about it. If I let it go for more than a day or two, though, I began to lose track of the salient points.

I’ve enjoyed blogging the trip. I hope you have enjoyed it as well. I don’t plan to blog our East Coast trip because it’s mostly to visit family, friends, and Harry Potter in Orlando. Our experiences and stories might find their way into blog posts, but they don’t need to be blogged as play-by-plays. Thanks for journeying with us on our adventure. If you’d like to see more of the photos, let me know; I’d love to show them to you. And if you’d like to hear more details about our trip, we’d love to tell you more.