Months before I even knew what a WordPress “theme” was, I started coming up with potential names for this blog. I played with all sorts of ideas and concepts trying to find just the right combination of words to appropriately reflect our intentions. One problem was I simply didn’t know what the blog would be about. To some degree, I still don’t.
Common wisdom is to name your blog something that will lure potentially interested readers in. But what happens when you don’t know what the blog is going to focus on? And what if you don’t know who your readers will be? What if you’re not sure you’ll have any readers at all? What if you’re undecided about how open you want to be with the intimate details of your life?
All of these questions led me to a concept though and it’s one I kept coming back to. The idea was this would be the ‘third chapter’ of our lives. In reflecting on my life, I commonly considered the time before meeting Kevin – growing up in my hometown, going to college, moving out on my own, etc. as the first chapter, followed by meeting him in grad school, getting married, buying a home and building our careers as the second chapter. As I thought about it, I realized whatever this blog chronicled, it would document an entirely new chapter for both of us.
What exactly will this third chapter be and how will this blog reflect it? Perhaps it will just be my online journal where I’ll keep track of where we were and what we saw at any given time. Anyone who knows me knows I have a terrible memory and routinely write things down and take photos in order to remember events.
Or perhaps this blog will turn into a bona fide travel blog that other people can reference for ideas on destinations and inspiration. Heaven knows many of the ideas we currently have were borne of my voracious reading of other travel and lifestyle blogs.
Perhaps our travels will remain domestic in an RV. Perhaps they will eventually be international. Our meanderings might go on for many years but they could just as easily keep us occupied for only a few months before we admit that we miss our old settled life and decide to buy a home and settle down once again.
Indeed, maybe this whole project will be a disaster and this blog will serve as little more than a cautionary tale for others. “See Jimmy? I told you these people were idiots. Now look what happened to them.”
No matter what happens, as we begin this third chapter of our lives, we know we want to travel and I know I want to write about it.
And if it turns out that our plans end in complete failure, I figure I can always check whois.com to see if Chapter4Catastrophes.com is available instead.