What the history adventuring project is all about


I've been history adventuring all of my life. And really, it just means that I find some kind of excuse to go wander off, and look at stuff. It really took off for me when I lived in Los Angeles, when I just needed to calm my jangled nerves, and didn't want to admit it. So I sought out quiet places, and found historical sites, like Los Encinos, in the San Fernando Valley. I would go there, and walk under old trees. If anyone asked I would say that I was interested in history, but the history was secondary. I just liked walking around and looking at stuff, and I still do.

About fifteen years ago I reached a crisis in my life after a life-threatening accident (please don't ask) which threatened to take away everything in my life. I went through physical therapy to learn to walk, I feared for the loss of my sight (yes, there's physical therapy for that, too), and mostly I felt trapped. So I started adventuring in my imagination, and many years later I started to write about it. That's when I created this blog, which allowed me to walk anywhere, even when I couldn't walk more than from room to room.

In the past couple of years my adventuring has expanded to IRL (which is an internet abbreviation for "In Real Life"). Old friends, and new friends, wanted to go history adventuring with me, and I knew a lot of places that I wanted to go. I write about them all of the time here, and my favorite places are in the Phoenix, Arizona area, and in the San Fernando and Conejo Valleys of Los Angeles.

I like doing this, and would like to continue in spite of whatever limitations I have, and will probably develop as the years go by. I figure that I have at least twenty, if not thirty more years of doing this, and really this is all I want to do. There's so much more for me to so, so much more for me to learn.

So that's the project. And I'm glad you're along with me. I have to admit that I thought that I'd be on this journey alone. Thank you for walking with me.

Image at the top of this post: The Sahuaro Ranch, one of my favorite places in the world. It's between 63rd Avenue and 59th Avenue and Peoria and Olive, in Glendale, Arizona. Just north of Glendale Community College.

If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more