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Around The World In 54 and 1/2 Days

Craig Whitton - April 4th, 2005

"This is the story of an adventure. A journey around the world. A journey of the mind, the heart, and me: Craig Whitton."Join Me...

Introduction by
Eric Renderking Fisk - 2011

Craig Whitton helped define The Fedora Chronicles when we first published this series back in 2005. Without him and this example I don’t think other people would get what we were trying to do as quickly as they did. “Around The World In 54 And A Half Days” perfectly capsulated what The Fedora Chronicles was supposed to be about.

Back in 2004 I came up the idea of a website where people like us, fedora wearing real-world travelers, would share our experiences. I vowed that this would never become a fan site for one particular film or bunch of films since there were so many pages out there that had done that to a varying degree. That didn’t appeal to me and I saw this huge vacuum in the “retroverse” where the readers were the actual heroes of our stories. There was little space to devote to where people have been going, what they’ve been doing and what they thought and did once they got there.

“Where is my tribute page? Where’s my fan site? I might not have saved the world but I’ve overcome some huge obstacles in life and I think that my story was an interesting read.” Not just me specifically, but I felt as if that’s what a lot of other people who were thinking the same thing. It seemed to me that once everyone got the pieces of their “costume” together, the next obvious was to go on “adventures.” The “Scrapbook” sections of other forums seemed sufficient at first, but never seemed to break through the threshold into being secondary in the list importance.

What was necessary is to take a different approach from the other retrocentric sites, have the travel logs and journals come first. What we’re doing, where we’re going, where’s we’ve been and how those experiences changed us had to take priority.

Doing “Around The World…” was a huge challenge for me because I had just started learning HTML and knew little about page layout. With little text and lots of pictures I had to make some serious creative decisions, this series really pushed me as a webmaster and inspired me to dive deeper into the code.

Most importantly, though – I’m really grateful to Craig for allowing us to publish his amazing story and the only regret I have is that he hasn’t gone on any other trips so we can do follow ups to this one. If he has, I’m more than happy to do this all over again with new material.

Eric Renderking Fisk – February 2011

Now... on to "Around The World in 54 And A Half Days..." Page One...

Around The World