In 2001, I’d moved to Chester and started working at a firm of accountants called Morris & Co.
While chatting to a new colleague, I commented that although I had a website, I’d love to own www.johnsunter.com.
What I didn’t realise at the time that he ran a web hosting business as a sideline and set it up for me as a gift.
I originally used the website to communicate with friends and mostly my mum back in Manchester.
If we went to the park or a new nice restaurant in Chester, I’d post pictures on there and write about it.
It was long before facebook, and allowed people to follow our “story” and see what we were doing.
A change in circumstances led to me starting over. Determined to turn the situation around I would start a new life in search of adventure.
But where to start, people like Chris Bonington and Ray Mears are gifted experts and I’m just an ordinary person.
And that’s when I got the idea…
johnsunter.com – the adventures of an ordinary person.
It would provide a sort of online diary of my successes and failures. It would also hopefully inspire other people.
After all, I’m just an ordinary person and if I can get to the Borneo jungle or stand on the Great Wall of China then anyone can do it can’t they ?.
I’d also write about my goals, motivations and how I did it, to save other people time if they wanted to do the same.
One problem I’ve always had though, was in putting all the effort into the actual adventures, it compromised the amount of time I had to update the website (logically, as it should be).
Sometimes I would be embarking on a trip somewhere and the website would be 3 trips behind.
This reached a hiatus last year, when I realised a trip to Lisbon in 2011 hadn’t been documented and it was reaching the end of 2015!.
I made a commitment that all the adventure pages would be updated by the end of 2016 !.
Problem is, it involved converting 90 pages over to the new system (which would take more than 135 hours).
Plus, I was 34 pages behind.
To choose the photos from a trip, set up the web page, storyboard it, check technical details then write up the text takes 6-11 hours per page.
Worse, since many of the trips were a while ago, I’d forgotten a lot of the details and would have to catch up on my notes adding even more time to the project.
An imposing task (if I also wanted to lead some sort of normal life, having a girlfriend and having just started a new job !).
But like my mum used to say, difficult and impossible aren’t the same thing.
I’ve woken an hour early every day, worked 2 evenings a week, 4 lunch hours a week and as much free time at weekend as I could without impacting on my social life.
And so, at 8pm last night, all the travel pages were finally updated. I consider it a great achievement and I’m delighted.
So now that I’ve done that, how can you find the pages ?
If you look on the right hand side of the page, starting from the top and working down.
Twitter feed: This shows my most recent activities and photo’s that are taken in situ (you might be looking a hillside scene, 1 minute after it happened). You can scroll down the most recent ones.
Most recent: The last 5 blog posts that I’ve done with the first picture and the date they were updated.
Country groups: listed according to geographical region, if you click on say Africa, it will open up with all the places in Africa that I’ve written about.
Finally, if you think its any good, feel free to post something on recent comments.