Family Travel

I’ve been tagged by Jas at Through the Lenses to follow up her post on the topic of ”Five Reasons Why I Travel.” 

“Tagging” other writers with a topic is a fun bloggy game, sort of like a chain letter but not nearly as annoying.  By the way, if you want good info on Thailand, check out Jas and her site.

Here goes:

1)  I like to scare myself.   Travel to new places is scary at some level, because you’re out of your element and out of your comfort zone.  I like to be brave, and one way to be brave is to train yourself to face the things you fear.  You can train yourself by going ahead and doing the things you’re afraid of, like getting out of your comfort zone.  I’ve been in so many strange places and felt weird so many times that now, I feel pretty comfortable just about anywhere. 

2)  I’m bored easily.  I want to know what’s over the next hill.  I want to see what’s new.  Don’t show me the money; show me something I haven’t seen already.

3)  I’m a know-it-all.  Since I want to know everything, I’m constantly reading, researching and learning.  The best way to learn about something is to surround yourself with it, so I travel to immerse myself in the knowledge of other cultures and people.  I sometimes say, “I don’t know much about XYZ topic, so I don’t have an opinion about it.”  Since I’m very opinionated, I can’t stand not knowing enough about something so that I can form an opinion.

4)  I’m a history buff.  I’ll read good history books all day, but I’d rather stand in the midst of a place where history happened, so I can really soak it in.  Do you know why it was specifically the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that was so involved in civil rights in Alabama?  I can tell you. I’ve been to Montgomery, Alabama and stood in front of that church, and I saw that it is just a stone’s throw from the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, where Governor George Wallace shouted, “Segregation forever!”  Location, location – and the church’s dynamic young pastor, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  I would not have such a visceral understanding if I had not personally traveled to that spot.

5)  I’m a culture vulture.  My house is stuffed with music, books, doo-dads and even food from my travels.  Why did I lug home a bamboo tingklik musical instrument from Bali?  Excellent question.  All I can tell you is that I smile when I tap it with its little mallet, and hear a sound that takes me back to my short visit to that magical island.  

Travel just makes me happy.  How about you?

Technorati tags: travel, family travel

Through the wonders of the blogosphere, I’m featured in a post this week by New Zealand blogger Liz Lewis.

It’s part of her series of email interviews with various travel writers worldwide, and I’m honored to be included in such esteemed company (and to be featured on a Kiwi blog!) 

I’m not sure how many pearls of wisdom that I bestowed in her interview with me, but feel free to pay a visit and leave a comment. 

Liz launched herself into the blogosphere with the gutsy My Year of Getting Published, an account of her efforts to get started as a real-live freelance writer and blogger.  

How’d she do it?  Hard work, careful building of a portfolio of published clips, properly targeted queries and playing to her strengths, including her expertise on New Zealand travel.  (She’s also a nurse, and landed a paid blogging gig discussing Alzheimer’s disease.)

I learned about her “publish thyself” project through Deb Ng, who scopes out writing jobs most weekdays at Freelance Writing Jobs, and gives good blogger tips at About.com’s About Weblogs.  Thanks for the intro, Deb.

Liz and I keep “running into each other” in the comments section of various travel blogs, especially the Perrin Post — I don’t know how you can manage to wave to another person in print, but somehow we do!

The blogosphere is like this very cool social gathering where you circulate and run into the neatest people….OK, so you do have the obnoxious drunks at the party sometimes; the ones whose writing makes you feel as though someone just grabbed your butt and needs a good smack upside the head.  

Overall, however, I love that I’m featured on a New Zealand blog, that the post includes a link to a Houston tech blogger who’s helped me a lot, he sees the link and sends me an email to say thanks, plus tells me that he put up a blurb about it on Twitter, which I learned about at SXSWi, which I wrote about for a wonderful blogger in Chicago, who I’m going to actually see in person next month, along with having dinner with another travel writer that I met online, where I also ran into Liz Lewis.

Technorati tags:  travel, family travel, blogging, travel writing, New Zealand

I was reading a post on [Continue reading this entry]

It's a mellow Monday, since I'm kinda pooped after a long weekend covering NASCAR events up in Fort Worth at the Texas Motor Speedway for Motorsport.com and Fast Machines. I ... [Continue reading this entry]

There are two terrific conferences for bloggers in the upcoming months, and I just want to take a moment to tell you about them in case ... [Continue reading this entry]

                                    It has been a busy spring for me, with tons of writing and blogging....really, who can complain about doing ... [Continue reading this entry]

I've said before ... [Continue reading this entry]

I've written about my own family's [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in Travel Tidbits | 1 Comment »