Transcript: Life Catch Up: Travel, Hiking, & More – DS532

Doug: Hey, what’s going on. Welcome to the Doug show. My name’s Doug Cunnington. And today we’re just going to have a bit of a catch up episode and I’ll tell you about what I’ve been up to over the past couple weeks and even a little bit over the summer. Plus some other things that I’ve had going on. I have been doing a handful of interviews.

I’ve been trying to get sort of back in the habit of doing the live streams. So for the last few weeks, I’ve been doing live streams and I can let you know the day after this episode airs. I’ll be interviewing Ricky Kessler from Income School about, uh, one of his sort of newer projects, or basically how to recover a website that has taken a dive over the last couple of years.

And We’ll be covering sort of his game plan. And the thing is, because it’s a live stream, I’ll be able to integrate some of the questions from the live audience. So if you’re watching this, the day that it comes out tomorrow, there will be a live stream with Ricky and most likely I will Take that live stream and edit it down and eventually you’ll be able to pick it up on the podcast stream and feed anyway, but join, join me live.

It’s fun to do the live stream. So anyway, I’ll let you know what’s been going on. Number one is a lot of. So, my wife retired at the end of March, so she’s been not working for about five months. She has lots of hobbies and stays pretty busy. We also like to travel, and over the summer and fall, we’ve been trying to get outdoors a little bit more.

So, we’ve actually gone on a couple trips here in the last couple weeks. And One of them was planned for many months and one of them was sort of a spur of the moment situation. And I was like, Hey, why don’t we do this? So I’ll tell you about that. And then I’ve also been doing a couple like hobby things.

So we’ll get into all those details. Perhaps I’ll link up to some of the, I think I might end up mentioning a product or two, but, uh, nothing huge. So anyway, number one, we’ve been doing a lot of hiking in the last few months. So we like to hike. We try to get out there every now and then, but Since my wife retired, she’s been hiking a lot more just on her own and with some friends.

And then, I actually was hiking a little bit more Because I knew I was going to be climbing a 14 or that’s a mountain over 14, 000 feet, which I think is, I think I don’t know how many meters you can Google. It’s like over 3000 meters, something like that. It’s pretty high. It’s like one of the thresholds.

So in Colorado, we have a lot of 14ers and it’s a thing that people do. So I knew I was going out with some friends to Breckenridge, one of the mountain and ski towns in August. So I was going to go out with some buddies and. We were going to do one of the 14ers right there, just a few minutes from Breckenridge called Quandary.

And it’s one of the more straightforward ones, and I think about six of us summited that day. It worked out great. I worked to get in shape to be able to do that. And then Once I did it, I was like, this actually wasn’t that bad. I’ve done a few of them in the past, but you kind of have to be in shape. It’s kind of like training for a like a running race or any kind of, you know, big thing.

So I, I was like, I’m in shape. So why don’t we try to do a couple more of this fall? It’s kind of a warm fall. So, The tallest peak in Colorado is called Milt Elbert. It’s the second highest peak in the lower 48. And I was like, I think we could do it. I have heard it’s not that difficult of a hike. It’s a little bit long.

It’s over. Right around 10 miles. And I think we can probably train a little bit and then we can do it. So talk to my wife. She was like, yeah, let’s go for it. It’s just outside of this town that we love called Leadville, which is one of the highest cities in the U S it’s like 10, 152 feet or 10, 200 feet.

Something like that. And. We got an Airbnb, stayed there for a few days, brought our dog, invited one of our friends who gets along well with our dog, Georgie. And that way our friend Dusty could watch Georgie while we were climbing the mountains so we wouldn’t leave Georgie at home all day long and stuff like that.

They’re at the Airbnb. So, that’s it. Anyway, we, uh, we planned ahead, had to deal with some weather. We adapted a little bit. We summited the mountain. So I did two 14ers this summer, and technically I’m in shape to do, to do more of them. So I don’t have any on my radar, but. The weather is holding up. So I think probably for another, maybe like two or three weeks could probably do some of the more straightforward 14ers.

And I’m, I don’t want to do any climbing or anything too crazy, but if it’s a straightforward sort of hike and no climbing, no, no crazy sort of situations and it’s not in the back country, then I can handle it. So anyway, I might do a little bit more of that. The other thing, we had a trip planned to the Great Basin National Park, which is in Nevada.

It’s just over the Utah border. It’s one of the most remote parks in the country, in the lower 48, and it’s very quiet. It’s not visited very often because it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. I think it’s like four hours from Vegas. I think it might be four or five hours from Salt Lake City. And it’s in the middle of nowhere.

In fact, it’s off US 50, which was called the loneliest highway in the US by, I think, Life magazine in 1986. And Basically AAA was like, there’s nothing out here. We don’t recommend it. So it’s one of those Highways that has a reputation. So there’s not much between you know, I mean, it’s really the whole span of the State of Nevada, there’s not much in that northern portion.

So you’re like driving through the desert. It’s pretty cool. It’s very quiet and When I was planning the trip, I was like, you know what we can go to so many different national parks I don’t want to go to a place that’s super busy and you know A couple parks come to mind like Zion and Bryce. Those are two national parks in southern Utah that I haven’t been to, but I don’t have a strong desire to go during any sort of season where there’s a lot of people.

I need to find the least visited week and try to go there. The thing is, they’re very popular and Utah did a great job. Job marketing their national parks. So a lot of people go to those parks. Pretty cool. But I mean, I don’t want to go to like the Disneyland of national parks. When I used to live in, in Bozeman, Yellowstone was very close.

It was like an hour and a half away. And the thing is, if you go during the shoulder seasons, if you go after Labor Day, before Memorial Day, and you kind of catch it when other people are there. You know, their kids are in school. There’s just not as many people. It’s a lot quieter. I usually tried to go like the week before they closed in like October or September, depending on what part of the park now you can’t always do that and, you know, nowadays a lot of people are remote, they’re able to work and there’s just like more people out in the outdoors, but anyway, the point is great basin, super fucking quiet.

It. I knew it was one of the least visited parks and it was right outside this town called Baker, Nevada, which if I did proper research before the trip, the census in 2022 log, the population at 21 people. Now there’s a few more people there because I have the national park. So there’s a handful of people that work there.

I think it might be more seasonal. So There’s probably like 70 people that sort of live in town or close by so still though That is not that many people. I definitely one of the most remote places I’ve been to one of the things that I wanted to do was Do some stargazing look at the night sky. You can see the Milky Way Very well, we lucked out with our weather.

It was extremely clear for two to three nights and It was the brightest I’ve ever seen the Milky way. They have an astronomy talk and they bring out some big telescopes. I think that might be like 14 inches, like. Very large scopes and they have an educational talk at night. And that was pretty cool.

There were a decent number of people there. So it wasn’t like you could just spend a lot of time on the scope. Although a lot of people had like full on conversations with You know, some of the Rangers that were hanging out there, great presentation overall. The coolest thing Milky way was super fucking bright.

So that was amazing. I tried to take some photos while I was out there, which is something I’ve dabbled in for a few years, not very seriously. And I, you know what? I don’t think I did a good job. I probably, I know like some of the mechanics, but it’s one of those things where you have to practice and then come back to your computer and do some editing and figure out like what you did wrong and then improve it later.

It’s kind of a slow cycle because you do have to go out there and take some photos, test some things out, and then try to edit and see what you screwed up. So. Couple pieces of equipment that I used for the astrophotography. I have a Canon RP. So that’s a full frame Canon. It’s one of the smaller Sort of less expensive in the R line.

One of the lenses I got was a 14 F 2. 8. So it’s a very wide angle lens on a full frame. So you get the full 14 millimeters. And then the thing is it’s it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit heavy to carry around, but if you’re doing astrophysiography, like you just put it in the tripod anyway, and it works great.

It’s a lot less expensive than the, the Canon brand. So I got it’s a Sam Young brand and feels really good. Feels really solid. I have no issues with it at all. I got the auto focus version and it works great. Actually carried it around when we were hiking out there. So I got that and I got an intervalometer, which allows you to you know, set a remote timer, you can set an interval, so it’ll take a series of images and you can set it to take like as many images as you want.

As you want until the battery runs out or you run out of space, which I never got close to that. I actually ended up, you know, looking, I didn’t take that many photos, but it was fun just to be out there. So back to the astronomy talk, pretty cool overall some entertaining speakers and all that stuff.

But the coolest thing we saw three kind of amazing things. So number one, we saw the ISS, the international space station. Which was pretty cool. Then we saw the Chinese space station go by like a little bit later. And then we also saw a series of the Starlink satellites. So if you haven’t seen these before, it’s very cool.

Starlink sends up I don’t know how many, like 20 satellites during a launch and they all kind of go together. So it’s neat to see a satellite go by, but there’s so many going by these days. Like if you just look up. After the sun sets, you’ll probably see a handful of them. But when you see the trail of these go by, it’s something a little special.

It looks weird. The first time that you see it, you’re like, this is something crazy. Is that, I don’t think it’s a UFO, but this is unusual. So we saw all three of those things in like an hour and a half, which was pretty cool. And if you haven’t seen it before, You could actually go and, you know, search online.

You could find out when the ISS is going to go over and try to watch it go by. You could find the Starlink you know, sightings as well. I’ve seen it a few times now, just happened to be out and about. And one time was an accident though. When my wife saw it the first time she was like, holy shit come outside and I took a look and it was pretty cool So anyway, we saw a handful of pretty cool things and get to look through the big telescopes and it was fun overall interesting thing Some people just really wanted to talk to the Rangers and it’s, it’s interesting.

I mean, there were probably 50 or 70 people or something like that, maybe less, but there was a good chunk of people and there were three telescopes and there were maybe four or five Rangers. And some, some people just are a little chatterboxes and this was like nine, 30, 10 at night. So some people were just like really into it.

And by the way. It’s not like, people were drinking or doing drugs or anything like that. Like these are just, it’s like dead sober folks. Some people are chatty and it was totally fine. But the thing is there was a big line at each telescope. So if someone just like talked to the Ranger and just kept asking questions, like it really slowed down the line.

So. It’s not like it was a contest to see like who could see the most things or anything like that, but it just went a little bit slower because of that. So travel’s been cool. We stayed at an Airbnb outside Grant Basin National Park. It was fine. It was interesting because there’s not many There’s not many people that live in the town.

So there’s only a couple like motels that you could stay in very small. And then there’s a couple Airbnbs. The ones that are closer to town are extremely limited. If you go a little bit further out, there were some other options, but we were in, it wasn’t, I mean, it wasn’t super duper small, but it was pretty small and it, the layout and the Airbnb that we were in wasn’t that great.

So we were, we were ready to come home. I’ll put it that way. We were ready to come home just because like, we didn’t have our normal amount of space and everything was a little bit limited. It was, you know, it was clean. It had all the right amenities. And there was a very small kitchen in that there was a mini refrigerator, a microwave, two burner induction stove, and a sink.

So you can. You can get things done. And we actually, you know, planned ahead. I brought a decent amount of groceries because I knew there was like no actual grocery store for a very long way. Like, I think we could have gone to a gas station that was about 10 minutes away that had some groceries, but pretty limited, like you could imagine.

So definitely an adjustment. And it wasn’t like, you know, normally if we go on a trip, it’s like, It’s okay if you forget something, cause you could go to like almost any store and like buy clothes, like if you forgot, uh, your toothbrush and all your toiletries and your underwear, you can go to a store and like buy stuff that you need, like, not a big deal.

We were in such a small remote area. Like if you forgot something, you’re going to be scrambling. You’re going to be trying to drive to a gas station and see if they have like toothpaste or whatever you forgot. Right. Right. So anyway, pretty cool. And good to be home. We’re glad to be back home. I don’t have any travel planned for a few weeks, which quick note, if you happen to be in the Atlanta area, going to FinCon in a few weeks, let me know.

Shoot me an email feedback at Doug dot show. I am going to that conference as I have been the last three years. Really fun conference. I’ve made a lot of friends there. I’ll be doing a couple interviews. I’ve already booked my spots in the video and podcasting booth. I don’t know what I’m recording or with who.

But I have this, I have this space and it’s booked. Other things I’ve been up to is a pickleball. So it’s obviously been taking the world by storm out there. My wife was getting into it. She’s a former tennis player and she pretty much like stopped playing in the last like year or two. She’s playing pickleball now.

I am not that great, but I’ve taken a couple of lessons. I’ve gone and played like on my own during like open play. And. It’s been pretty fun learning. It is, it’s fun. It’s fun. It’s social. And the cool part is you, you can pick it up pretty quick, quickly and start playing and you could play with people that are more experienced, of course, like any sport, if you, you know, go play with people that are like really awesome and they’re not playing super nice with a beginner, then it’ll be a little bit tough.

That said I played with people. That just learned and within like a day or two, they were doing really awesome people that are more either athletic or coordinated, or maybe they play another sport, not even a racket sport, but any kind of sport, you could pick it up super fast, which was kind of amazing.

Like I, I played with someone who I think they were sort of a high level basketball player and they picked it up. Within, I mean, no time at all. And they were playing at a high level within like two weeks. So if you haven’t checked it out and people are talking to you about it, you can bite the bullet.

You don’t have to be embarrassed. You can get out there and try and play. It is pretty fun. The other, the other funny thing is I think I have gotten better in just the last few weeks, but I go out and play and a lot of the people that play are older. Right. They’re, they’re older in their like sixties or seventies, and maybe they played tennis before.

And the thing is like, you’ll get your butt kicked by. Old people that look like they could barely get around, but they have like the racket skills and it’s it puts you in your place really quickly, fun sport. I’ll plug the racket that I use. Cause actually, uh, my wife and I got, they have like a a set that you can get, so you get like two rackets for a hundred dollars, which is like once you decide that you do like it and you’re like, okay, I need a racket.

That’s a little bit better. These are not. Too expensive. Cause it goes, you know, you could pay a couple hundred dollars, three, 400 for a racket. If you, if you look at rent round, I guess you call them a paddle, but Friday, the brand Friday was recommended to me by a friend and we got them. They feel good.

Definitely an upgrade over the cheap. Ones that you can get in a starter set. And the thing is my wife and I were playing, we’re on the same team. We hit paddles cause we’re going after a ball that was sort of in the middle of us. And I broke my racket. Like it started to crumble like in the end of it.

And. There was a, I think there was like a 99 day or 90 day warranty or no questions asked. So basically I was at day 95 or something like that and they sent a brand new paddle. So they have good customer service and they actually did, did honor that even though it was a, you know, playing issue. It wasn’t like.

I didn’t like it or there was some other, you know, manufacturing issue. So Friday, good paddles. I have a blue one, if anyone cares, it’s the blue one. And I think they have like a different, a lot of different designs and stuff. So if you get a set of them, you don’t get them mixed up with whoever you’re sharing it with.

Other thing, we’ve been doing a decent amount of yard work. So just domestic stuff. We don’t have a big lawn or anything like that, but it does require some work and Not that I let it go, but earlier this year it was in rough shape, so I actually like aerated it and got some special fertilizer. We have a lot of clay and whatever fill dirt they threw in our development here.

It helped. I didn’t think it was going to make that big of a difference where I grew up. You didn’t really have to fertilize it. Like if you did fertilize it, it would green up and stuff like that. But really we had tons of like leaves and compost and it was very green. And here is practically a desert, fairly arid.

And like I said, it’s, it’s a lot of clay in our yard. So there, the. Kind of fertilizer has like extra iron in there. Apparently that helps and yeah, just other kind of stuff in the yard. So I guess that is work, but not online work at all. Couple other things, which I’ll actually give an update on podcast stuff as well, including ranking revolution.

One other thing. I have, I think I may have mentioned it in the past, but not for a while. So there’s a, I guess it’s a nonprofit and it’s a startup accelerator. It helps entrepreneurs that are underrepresented, underrepresented in communities. So basically they give classes and they have mentors assigned.

To the entrepreneurs. So it’s called E for all entrepreneurship for all. And you guys could go check it out, but I’ve been meeting once a week for about an hour and I taught one of the classes as well. So it’s just, you know, a way to give back. The cool part is it, it does help underrepresented folks and entrepreneurs specifically in the community

and basically it’s. In your local community. So these businesses are either in Longmont or the Boulder or Colorado area. So it’s kind of cool. And when I sort of looked at the success rate and they, I think they published it on the website, so we’ll link up so you can check it out, but like e for all has an extremely high success rate for companies to stay in business for like several years beyond.

The program. So the education component helps a lot. It helps people understand like cashflow and marketing and the value proposition and all these different pieces of being an entrepreneur. And then you’re hooked up with a couple mentors, two mentors in this case. So. I have done this one other time I did it back in 2020.

And, you know, it’s a fairly big commitment being an hour per week, but at the same time, it’s like, it’s only one hour per week. So I was like, you know what? They asked me often, and I think they really needed some help this last time around. So I was like, yeah, I’ll go ahead and I’ll, I’ll be a mentor.

And the thing is, it’s only one hour per week. So I was like, I think maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll do this moving forward. Maybe I’ll take a break every other quarter or something like that. I’m not sure how many they have running. And then after the, the quarter meeting once per week, you you know, you trim it down to once per month for the next year.

So it is an ongoing commitment. And if I. Did several of these and they would stack on top of each other. So I do have to keep that in mind. Plus with all the travel, I had to reschedule a couple of times, but that sort of thing will happen from time to time, other updates. So mile high fi, my other podcast with, uh, It’s about personal finance and financial independence.

It’s great. I have a fun time there. Carl is leaving the show. So we actually recorded a whole episode about that. Carl, even though he retired, I believe seven years ago. He retired several years ago. He’s extremely busy. He took on a lot of projects and he has just stuff he needs to do. It was actually an ongoing theme throughout the whole entire podcast.

So anyway, Carl decided to step away. The thing is he had been out of the. Office occasionally anyway. So I had guest hosts sit in. So luckily I know a lot of people that are interested in personal finance. Maybe they, they have their own podcast. Maybe they wanted to podcast and they’ll come and sit in with me.

And there’s a lot of people here in the town I live in Longmont, Colorado. So I actually like have people that can like join me down in the studio here. And I definitely prefer that over a remote situation, but. I will have a couple of remote folks fill in and be a co host. Otherwise, I could just do like one on one interviews.

So I think I’ll be okay on that front and I’ll probably have to change a few things here and there. But I think overall it should work fine. And I think I should be able to get some great co hosts to sit in occasionally. And hopefully it’ll be Not too much on any one person and every now and then, maybe once a quarter, someone can sit in with me, something like that.

Ranking Revolution, that is my other podcast about SEO and marketing for professionals. That one has been going slow. So maybe I’ll give another full update on that. And what it comes down to is, you know, all the travel and the fun stuff that I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing that instead of really working on marketing and being like ultra efficient and effective on like Producing the show and marketing it.

I think the show is high quality. I think there could be Some things that I could do better especially in promoting the show, but it’s a it’s a little bit tougher than I thought the the issue I think Maybe I mean it might not be You It might not be exactly this, but with actually, I was going to end up making an excuse.

I’ll tell you what it is though. I was like with the Google updates that have been rolling out and just the churn, I feel like sort of the, the normal topics that I would cover, like don’t hit as well, but I realize I’m wrong because I know. Other shows, Authority Hacker News, for example, that’s who I thought of.

I was like, Oh, they’re actually doing, doing well. Like they’re growing quickly and you know, there’s, you know, there’s a piece there. They’re able to promote their show. Their, their new channel a little more effectively than I am in that I think they have like a bigger audience in general with the, the Facebook group that they have as well.

I think they have a Facebook group and then a giant email list that said, I mean, I, I do have an email list, but I’ll be honest with you, the, the, the. The sort of growth and activity has dropped off dramatically because of the lack of interest in niche sites and content sites in general, really, I mean, it just dropped off like crazy.

So I’m sort of at a spot where I’m like, okay, I’m looking at ranking revolution and I’m like, the branding seems fine. The content seems good. Some people actually really like the show, but there’s only like a few dozen. And I really hope that I was going to, once I hit some critical mass, that it was going to grow a little bit faster and just sort of take off maybe on YouTube where it’s like, Oh, people want to see this specific content.

But as I’m looking at it, I’m like, I’m going to do something a little bit different or pull the plug. Right. So one thing that I’ve considered, I’m just like, should I just. Kill the show, just, I could try to, you know, sell it or one of those things. I mean, I think I know the answer. Cause you know, I’ve talked to thinking of like, any number of people with their sites, they’re like, well, why don’t I spend a little bit more time on it?

And if I actually focus for like a quarter, then it should take off and then maybe I could sell it. And when I’m thinking about that, I’m like, they never did that. And I’m thinking to myself and I’m like, there’s no fucking way. Like, am I actually going to do that? Like, would it be better to just bundle it up, see if anyone wants to buy it?

And if not cut the losses, it is a sunk cost. I have. Shit. I think I have like 50 episodes or something like that. Like, it’s not bad, but at the same time, I’m like, am I, is it growing? I’m actually going to put in the work. And as of right now, like I am not as enthusiastic as I was. Like one year ago, the thing is I thought about it for several months before I actually started doing it.

So with that said, I’m like, well, I guess I, I mean, I, I did want to do it at some point, but do I still want to do it right now? It’s okay. If I change my mind, it’s just, it’s like, I think it’s still a good idea. And when I chat with people about it, they’re like, yeah, it’s a good idea. But as I’m doing it, I’m like, do I want to do the work?

So anyway, if you have any thoughts on this, let me know. Please do let me know if you want to buy a podcast. It’s all bundled and ready to go to put your ads right on there. Yeah, you could do it. But like I said, I mean, you could go look at the ranking revolution YouTube channel, handful of views here and there people watch it.

And then there are. Probably, like I said, few dozen people that download the audio version, but I was, I was hoping like it would actually take off a little bit more on YouTube, but YouTube is tough and it is a specific kind of content that doesn’t have like a viral component at all. So. That’s it for today.

I’ll put links in the description so you can check out a few things. If you’ve ever done like editing with astrophotography, shoot me an email. I’ve watched a lot of videos and stuff, but I’m just, when I try to edit, I’m just like, this doesn’t quite work and struggling with it just a little bit. And then I’m like, what do I, what do I really want to do with the images?

Like if I had a couple of turnout, like what would I do with them? I might print them out, but maybe not. I don’t know. All right. That’s it for today. Thanks a lot. And we’ll catch you on the next episode.