The Top Meanders of 2022

Mmmm, bison potroast from Owamni Restaurant.

Well, the tenth year of “Marie’s Meanderings” is wrapping up. I made up for a lack of meandering during the pandemic with many more travel posts than in the past few previous years. That made for fewer musings than usual and more practical information. So, it’s not surprising that this year’s most popular posts feature outings that Russ and I took. One was to the homestead of my father’s side of the family in central Minnesota, the other to a popular cross-county ski trail in northern Wisconsin, and the last to a new restaurant in Minneapolis.

Drumroll, please! Here are the top posts for 2022:

1. A Family Tradition Returns – My father’s ancestors emigrated from Germany to Minnesota in the mid-1800s. Every two years, the descendants all gather in the town near the family farm for a picnic. This story is about the picnic and the family history. Several of my relatives helped with facts and photos, and they shared the post among the family, which I suspect accounts for its popularity.
   
   
2. Superior Skiing – Chronicles our first cross-country ski outing in the Superior Municipal Forest. This city forest is one of the largest in the country and sports trails perfect for all levels of skiers. This post got shared among local skiers via social media, which accounts for its popularity.
   
   
3. Owamni Restaurant: Celebrating Native American Cuisine – Russ and I were lucky enough to snag a chair (well, actually two chairs) for dinner at Owamni, a Minneapolis restaurant run by Chef Sean Sherman who wrote the “Sioux Chef” cookbook. This unique eatery specializes in precolonization food – natural foods that Natives ate before European colonization of the U.S.

Thank you for meandering with me for yet another year. I plan to keep writing whenever something of interest happens or meanders into my head. I’m working on getting a fiction book published, so my posts might be fewer than usual until I make headway with that, and then there’s this long fiction story I need to finish . . . but I will not abandon my blog!

The Year in Blogging, 2018

The image from my most popular post of 2018. No, I am not flipping you off! Photo by Jak of the Mast Cells & Collagen Behaving Badly blog.

Traffic to my blog continues to grow slowly. Part of the slowness is because I don’t have a lot of time to visit other blogs and court their owners’ readership of mine. I am too busy living life and writing about it! But at least my readership isn’t shrinking.

In 2018, more than 7,100 people visited my blog and it had over 8,900 views.

Here are the three most popular stories I wrote this year, plus the most popular overall:

#1 Writer’s Bumps: An Endangered Condition? – My, my, my, but many people have mysterious bumps on their hands! I had no idea. I wrote this post as a joke because I thought that the cushioning bump that grows on writers’ middle fingers when they hold a pencil was going out of style in this age of computer keyboards. Apparently not! Almost every day someone finds my story because they are wondering what the heck that thing is on their finger.

#2 Echoes of the Past: A Sneak Peek Into the Hotel Chequamegon – I had the chance to stay in an historic hotel in Ashland, Wisconsin, for a writing contest reading I gave last winter. I wrote a review of my stay. Hardly anyone else has written reviews, so I suspect that’s why people who are interested in the hotel are finding it.

#3 A Visit to the Tallest Waterfall in Minnesota – A friend and I visited High Falls in Grand Portage State Park last winter and lived to tell the tale, which involved slippery footing and some harmless trespassing.

The most popular post during my six years of blogging is one I wrote in 2017 about a bad experience my dog had with his food. It involved some sleuthing and label reading on my part. To think, I almost didn’t write it, but then went ahead because I hoped others might find the information useful. I guess my hunch was correct.

Iams Dog Food Alert!—This story’s popularity is unfortunately because many dogs other than mine have had bad reactions to the sneaky changes this company made in the recipe of their dog food. I wish it wasn’t so popular, but more and more people keep finding it though searches. I am glad the story is providing them with answers, but sorry to hear that their dogs are having problems.

Thank you again for meandering with me, and Happy New Year wherever you may be . . .