So remember that time Oats and I drove cross country? You may have forgotten, because haven’t posted a blog since we were on the road in September! Let me explain why. A few weeks into the trip, I made a decision to hold off on creating more blog posts and editing photos so that I could just be present and enjoy my trip with Oats and with friends and family. Our days were very full, tiring, and wonderful. Often we were visiting with friends and family, making new friends, hiking, swimming, and seeing all the incredible sites all over this beautiful country. Most of our travel days pretty much went like this: wake up early, breakfast (for both of us), pack up our car for the next leg of the journey, fill the gas tank, drive to a beach or a hike or a park (or sometimes all three), spend some wonderful time outdoors, shop at a local pet store to get Oats a treat (spoiled), then drive to our next location, find a place to stay, eat dinner (Oats first of course), unpack our car for the night, meet up with friends (in several locations), quick research and plan out the following day…meaning where we would drive to, where we would hike/swim/adventure, and where we would sleep. It was amazing, but there wasn’t a whole lot of time built in to our days for being on the computer editing and blogging, so I made a decision that the adventure was the priority, and I would do the blogging when I got home.

Well…a couple crazy things have happened since. First, I broke my camera in Montana, on our very last adventure stop in Glacier National Park. My hands were very cold and I was trying to move too quickly and didn’t correctly attach my camera to the tripod, and….it fell. We enjoyed a lovely (and cold) day in Glacier National Park and Whitefish anyway, and then we headed home. It took about 5 days to get back, and then we immediately got to work on moving out of my house, which sold while I was on the road (yay!).

After the craziness of moving and closing on a home sale, I was finally able to sit down and take some time to look through my trip photos. This was when I learned that breaking a camera is hardly the worst thing that can happen to a photographer on an amazing trip.

While I was on the road, my laptop filled up, so I bought a brand new external hard drive, put all my photos on it (to free up space on my laptop for more), and drove home. I normally do multiple backups, so when I got home I plugged it in to do said backups. And the drive failed. Like...complete and total mechanical failure.

I brought it into two local places to see if they could recover the data, and called the brand manufacturer for the drive. I ultimately sent it in to the manufacturer for recovery, while also on my own working to recover some data off my memory cards and some from my cloud backup. For a while I was devastated, thinking that all of my trip photos were gone. However, I have been able to recover almost all of them through these various methods. They were not all recovered, but most. For that, I am eternally grateful. They are still a disorganized mess, but I’m sorting through them slowly and will start to finally post them on Facebook and Instagram and put together my blog posts!

Sometimes crazy things happen, but we still have all of our amazing memories. And *most* of our memorable photos. More to come ❤️

9.21.18 | Oats in Cannon Beach, Oregon