The Wilder Coast Turns Two!

The Wilder Coast turned TWO a few weeks ago but I was too busy to notice. Last year I commemorated the first year with a little birthday post. At that point, TWC had 109 posts and been viewed by 4,742 people in over 23 countries.

One year later, TWC is now at 365 posts. It has been viewed by over 37,000 people in over 100 countries.  We (the writing team and the photography team, aka me and me) think that's some serious growth! Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, and thank you for donating. If you were not reading, I would not be writing, and if I wasn't writing this, I really wouldn't be a writer.

So celebrate with me by checking out this year in review, with links to some of the year's most popular posts . And thank you for reading. 

When it began, I was in Patagonia...

I had that dream job over in Chile. I was a bad ass kayaker. Or at least it appeared as such. I went Chilean Creeking, and Kayak Surfing and River running and was always running around sunburnt, exhausted and doing dangerous things. I found myself, somehow, at the epicenter of the kayaking world in Pucon, Chile, wondering whether or not I should fall down the rabbit hole of the paddler identity.  And I was dating my boss, David, he was much older than me and I loved him very, very much. But I never wrote about it. I was rejected by a mormon missioniary, and we stumbled upon one of the most evil places on the planet and found a waterfall there which turned Tino on his head. I was in Chile for a few months,  and I fell down the stairs in front of Lorenzo, and I started missing a normal life and I slept with a bag of coffee.

My blog got a little more interesting because I got a new Ipod with a video camera in it and took and posted all sorts of videos. But the stress of the job got to me, I suppose, and I had a lot of terrible migraines. I left Dave in Chile and I left my friends behind and I left my job.

So I Started Over and Moved to North Carolina

I fell completely in love with a boy I met on the Grand Canyon years earlier. And I moved to boone to be with him. And my very first day there  I met a Legend which was really a good sign.  For once I had a boyfriend on valentines day and I tried my hand at domesticity. And things were luminous,  life was so good. But I still got a lot of migraines. Which made things complicated. And I thought and wrote a lot about being young and broke and happy and constantly worried about everything, but  I had a good time anway. I started being a little more honest with those  ambivalent feelings that everybody relates so. From these posts I got a lot of feedback, emails, comments, even a letter from a stranger.

During this time in Boone, I wrote a lot.  I wrote Steph's story. I was accepted into the BlogHer Publishing network and won the BlogHer Voice of the Week award for my essay about magical thinking and food.  There was a really nice review about it. I messed with the format and pages and tried out new ways of posting photos and new way of telling stories. I asked for some money and people from all over were surprisingly generous.

And funny things happened, and I wrote about them, like my run in with the law and the fountain incident at the Holiday Inn. I discovered that people are a lot more interested in reading about the little funny things that happen to you than they are in just another narcasistic adventure story.  Things started falling into place and I had a lot of friends and had the life I wanted. But then I ran over a badger and was cursed.  Will and I broke up, it hurt like a bitch and I left and then I barfed all over West Virginia, which was okay since I don't like West Virginia anyway.

Then I Moved Back to New England

I spent the summer alone on a hill in Vermont. I was sad but it wasn't horrible, and I stopped getting migraines. I got hired as a writer for Soul Pancake and was finally effected by the shit economy. While on hiatus from life, I wrote the most popular post ever written which, fortunately or unfortunately, included the word panties in the title. This made me real popular with all sorts of people who search for weird things on the internet. An editor read my piece on the Siete Tazas and a few months later it was published in a magazine and I went and bought it a book store in Maine where I was leading a  teen girl squad in the wilderness.

It was a slow summer. I had beautiful visitors. And I had one epic trip to the Ottawa River and when I returned I was only interested in writing in rhyme.  And I decided that my goal in life is to write for television.

But it's hard to write for television when you live alone in Vermont. It's hard to do anything, really. So I drove for 5 days across the country, stopping once to remind myself that I am still entangled, and now I'm here.  And there is a lot to write about.

What in hell will the next year bring, is what I want to know. Living one day at a time is like reading really slow fiction.  (But I hope you keep reading.)