Cow Reports!

So, what's a "Cow Report," you ask?

In March, 2001, I decided to drive back to Los Angles for my first visit since relocating to Tulsa the previous December. Shortly before the trip I bought a new Toshiba laptop, since I'm a hard-core techie propellerhead and can't be without a computer for very long before suffering severe withdrawal symptoms. Tulsa to Los Angeles is about 1,500 miles, and I split the trip into three days of roughly 500 miles per day. The first day, from Tulsa to Albuquerque, I discovered that the world is awfully flat and boring! That night, sitting in my motel room, I wrote up an e-mail for my friends to let them know what the day was like. I joked that the landscape, particularly between Oklahoma City and Tucumcari, was so dull and boring that the only way I could remain alert was to keep an eye out for cows in the fields alongside the Interstate, trying to see how many different types of cows I could spot.

I had fun with the joke, mild though it might be, and continued to write about cows I spotted during the remainder of the trip, as well as the return to Tulsa. During subsequent trips, I continued the habit of relating my day's activities in nightly e-mail notes to my friends. And this tiny little joke about the cows became a thread in all of these reports. Somewhere along the line these nightly trip reports became known as the "Cow Reports". (I had to call them something.)

In September, 2002, I took a driving trip to Ohio, my first real vacation of the year. Armed with my Minolta Dimage7 for the first time, and knowing that some of the friends I was planning to visit had broadband Internet connections, I decided to maintain a web page describing my progress on the road. The idea worked out marvelously well, and is presented here as "Cow Report #6".

I hope you enjoy my little travelogues!

Cow Report #8: A Springtime Visit to Los Angeles, April 2006

Cow Report #7: Christmas in Los Angeles, December 2002.

Cow Report #6: A Visit to Ohio, September 2002.