Half A Million!

“The three most exciting sounds in the world: anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles.” George Bailey – It’s a Wonderful Life

Almost exactly one month ago I was able to write a post that celebrated a statistical achievement when my companion blog ‘Age of Innocence’ hit the milestone of 400,000 hits and today I can post that my main blog site ‘Have Bag, will Travel’ has finally made it to the half a million mark!  I would have got there a lot earlier if Google hadn’t changed their search engine algorithm in February 2013 which halved the number of page hits at a stroke because prior to this I was moving close to 15,000 hits a month but now wheeze along at about 5,000.

Thank you to anyone who has ever visited a page here.

As I said before I am not conceited enough to think that all of these are genuine visits and I am certain that a lot of web surfers will have found themselves on one of my one thousand, one hundred and twenty posts by mistake and wondered what on earth they were doing there.

To emphasise that I notice that the website http://www.webstatsdomain.org includes this rather flattering but wildly inaccurate assessment:

“Apetcher.wordpress.com is ranked 15 in the world (among the 30 million domains), a low rank means that this website gets lots of visitors. This site is estimated worth $38,018,523,303.”

 Wow and if only!

I started the blog on 1^st May 2009 when I finally abandoned blogger.com and moved to WordPress as, in my opinion, a far superior blogging platform.

My intention was to share my travel experiences.  I had noticed that as I travelled more and more I was forgetting more and more so I began to keep a notebook with me and to write down all of the trivial things about my journeys and holidays; I had hoped that one day my children my discover the notes and find them interesting in the same way that ten years ago I took ownership of my dad’s notebooks and discovered his ordinary but interesting life.

A big thank you to anyone who has ever visited a page here.

To date the ten most visited posts are:

Norway, Haugesund and When Vikings Ruled The World

Krakow, Wieliczka Salt Mine

Sorrento, Mount Vesuvius – Living on the Edge of Disaster

Royal Garden Party

Norway, Europe’s Most Expensive Country

Onyx UK and an Inappropriate Visit To The Moulin Rouge

Pula, Croatia

Travel Tips For Beating Budget Airlines At Their Own Game

Spartacus, Freedom Fighter or Bandit?

Greece 2010, The Colossus of Rhodes