Earthwatch: Amazon Riverboat Exploration

At long last, I finally got my write-up finished. In my defense, there was a lot to do right away after I got home.

First I had to get all 975+ photos loaded up onto a site where I could then share them with all the other volunteers. This was harder than it sounds – well, okay… not hard exactly, but it sure took a lot of time. I started one evening when I got home from work – and didn’t get finished till well into the following afternoon! I loaded them all and just left my computer on to chug away at it till it was finished; thankfully it never once locked up or froze or anything!

Then I had about 2 weeks to create a presentation for the Eagle River Nature Center about my trip. This meant that I had to contact Earthwatch’s main office down in Boston to ask them for their most recent presentation template – only to find that I had the most recent one. I felt it should be updated, however, so I combed through all the information they had online and picked out all the pertinent facts to plug in to the appropriate spots in the power-point program I had. Once I got all the general information updated, I then started in on the Amazon trip, tagging on 5 more slides at the end. I’m rather pleased with the results, truth be told. I got some good feedback on it, too.

By this time my brother was chomping at the bits for me to get to work on the travelogue. He is my Webmaster, having created it for me a few years ago as a birthday gift. He works heavy construction, so gets the winters off and was looking for something to occupy his time. Plus, spring was getting on (eventually) and he knew he only had so much free time left. If I didn’t get my part done in time, he wouldn’t be able to get his part done till the following winter!

I don’t know if any of you have ever tried your hand at writing; if you have, perhaps you have the same problem I have. Namely BEGINNING a story. That is the hardest sentence to write! I can sometimes just sit there for days on end with the proverbial blank sheet of paper in front of me, just waiting for that sentence to appear.

Thankfully, a computer is a little bit nicer to an author in that we can now start in the middle of a story and edit things out, rearrange things, go back to the beginning and rewrite things – all of that – so much easier! We no longer have to worry about that first sentence quite as much as before computers.

But, as I said, at long last I finally got the write-up completed. The next step was to go through all 975+ photos and pick out the best ones to complement the story – not an easy task, but it was fun to relive the entire trip over and over again – and then think of something witty and informational to say about each one.

The end result can be viewed here:     Amazon Riverboat Exploration