Wow – it has been a challenging two years, yet I have been able to maintain and grow the blog despite the COVID pandemic and travel restrictions.

I thought I would reflect a little on what has made the blog successful and exploring some of the statistics over the past 3 years. Some results were exciting and expected and some quite surprising.

Let’s start with the overall number of visitors and views.

2019 was a highlight year for travel for sure and the blog views and visitors grew accordingly. It was the highest volume in the nine (9) year history of the blog with over 7,000 unique visitors with over 13,000 views.

So, what was the hottest blog posting that was the most popular in 2019?

Lady Gaga of course! It was a great concert and the posting received a lot of traffic. Her videos became some of the most popular I posted on my YouTube channel.

The second most popular posting was the blogs I posted on China and our travel to Hong Kong. The Exploring Hong Kong posting was very popular (as expected) as we were visiting during the major protests at the time which captured a lot of news around the world.

Next, lets take a peek at where many of the visitors come from. 2019 was a year when I started getting many more followers from around the world and visitors from China quickly became in the top ten!

Let move on to 2020. The year of the pandemic due to COVID. The numbers pretty much dropped in half. As expected.

It became a year of mostly restricted and local travel in WA state since it was not safe to fly, travel or get almost anywhere due to the restrictions and lockdowns. But it was a good opportunity to explore and learn of many of the great places to visit in WA state that we had never visited before.

The number one posting was when we found a way to get married in Las Vegas the very day the whole state, city and country started locking down everything. A pretty funny story if you are interested in checking it out.

Taking at the country list, the stats were a little interesting for 2020. Of course the United States stayed on top, but started to get a lot smaller countries residents interested and checking out the blog that year.

Now, lets look at 2021. Truly a challenging year for the pandemic and limitations on travel despite many places opening that were not open before. The total numbers were really surprising and exciting. The number of visitors almost reached the peak of 2019 and were almost 100 short of being the top year ever. The number of views globally skyrocketed as well despite the limitations on travel and the smaller number of postings I was able to publish.

So, what caught everyone’s interest this year? A number of items. Some continued WA state local sites and places to visit. and unfortunately, I decided to share some realities of the need to get vaccinated, boosted and accepting that the pandemic is going to become a long term epidemic. We are going to need to receive vaccinations and prove we are vaccinated to travel for many years.

The number one posting was based on my veteran service and being awarded a certificate for my service during the Cold War as a US veteran.

I also started to get a lot of interest on posting about watches and this is something I might consider writing about more of in the future since watches became a very hot topic in 2021.

Surprisingly, my recent posts on visit to Hawaii in December did not catch that much interest for some reason. Not exciting? Who knows?

Looking at the country stats, I was surprised to see China staying on the top 5 of visitors to the site. Why India #1 this year? No idea why, but certainly intriguing.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the continued diversity and different countries that get added to the list. Pretty much every country in the northern hemisphere of the planet. Africa remains to be the largest gap which is not surprising. I may have to try some travel there in the future when we are able to help get the world vaccinated.

What is on the table for the year ahead? Always looking for some suggestions, but it will be a combination of an exciting, scary, interesting and challenging year ahead with Omicron kicking off 2022 as the number one topic on top of everyone’s mind. Stay tuned to this channel!