Lonely Planet Blogsherpa

For most of my life, I felt like I didn’t belong. In elementary school, I was chubby, had crooked teeth and crossed eyes, and my mother, God bless her, permed my hair into a ridiculous frizzy mass. They called me four eyes and probably lots of other names I never knew about. In high school I was nearly two years younger than everyone else because I’d been moved ahead twice – being one of the “eggheads” certainly didn’t help my popularity. Throughout my adult life I had great business success, but never liked what I did for a living. Certainly, I had friends, but I always felt like there was a huge, gaping hole in my life. It wasn’t until I left the corporate life to pursue my true passions of world travel, writing, and photography that I found my true calling. I finally found my “tribe.”

About a year ago, that tribe grew exponentially when Lonely Planet invited me to join its Blogsherpa program, which imports content from member blogs to the Lonely Planet website. When visitors to the LP website search for information on a particular travel destination, they can now also read posts from Blogsherpa bloggers that refer to that destination. It was a great concept – tie a commercial site to people who are actually out there on the road, traveling the world.

Then something miraculous started to happen. Lonely Planet bloggers began to band together. A simple proposal to exchange links quickly evolved into plans to interview one another on our various blogs and publish a book about our collective world travel experiences. In the midst of all these wonderfully creative ideas, one Blogsherpa member created a special website – a Squidoo lens – where the content from all of our blogs is imported. Travel junkies can now read world travel posts from Lonely Planet’s top notch bloggers in one easy place.

Finally, I feel like I belong. I’ve found my tribe and I’m thrilled to be able to share it with all my readers.

I’d been in Mazatlan, Mexico for exactly one day when I received an email from Nancy Dardarian. She and her husband are American expats from the Seattle area who retired to Mazatlan more than two years ago. When they first started thinking about moving permanently to Mexico, Nancy and Paul launched a blog, Countdown to Mexico, in order to chronicle the entire decision making and relocation process. Not only is it a great resource for anyone considering moving to Mexico, it’s full of the most interesting information about Mazatlan.

Nancy and Paul Dardarian, Mazatlan, Mexico

But here’s the fun part. Nancy has Google alerts set up to email her when anyone writes about Mazatlan, so when my first blog post appeared about her adopted city, she read it and emailed, asking if I would be staying long enough to get together. They picked me up at my hotel last Sunday and treated me to lunch at one of the beach palapas along the Malecon – the traditional Ceviche they served me was so huge I could hardly finish half of it. Even better, they invited another expat friend, Michael, to join us for lunch, because they knew of my plans to hike Mexico’s remote Copper Canyon and Michael has hiked it twice. As a result I now have a remarkable amount of information about Copper Canyon – the kind of stuff that can’t even be found on the Internet. Serendipitous events like this aren’t uncommon; they happen to me all the time when I travel slow, without plans, and allow the path to unfold before me.

One thing is for sure. It’s definitely a small world out there.

Following two intense days at BlogHer 2009, I headed back into Chicago for Travel Blog Exchange ’09, a one day event for travel bloggers sponsored by TravelBlogExchange.com. The website was founded just last year by Kim Mance, host of Galavanting.tv, and editor-in-chief of GoGalavanting.com, as a place for those who blog about travel to connect with one another as well as members of the media, travel industry professionals, vendors, and advertisers.

Kim, along with fellow TBEXer Debbie Dubrow of DeliciousBaby.com, organized the inaugural event. And what an event! They envisioned that it would someday attract every person on their “dream list” of travel bloggers/writers they’d most like to meet. Even Kim and Debbie couldn’t have imagined their vision would become a reality on this first ever get-together, but that’s exactly what happened. Attendees included BootsnAll Travel, National Geographic Traveler ombudsman Chris Elliott, Wendy Perrin from Conde Nast Traveler, Disney, WorldHum, and Gadling, among others.

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know that I fled from corporate life in December of 2006 to do what I love – travel writing and Read the rest of this entry »

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they write. The good writers are wide open. They don’t pull any punches. They’re honest about their feelings – sometimes to the point of being raw. They’re not afraid to integrate their lives, their feelings, and their experiences into what they write.

I am constantly appalled at the poor quality writing to be found on the Internet and in published materials. Conversely, I am always delighted when I discover well-written blogs that make me cry, wonder, sigh, gasp, ponder, or even laugh out loud. The following are a few of the later. I share them because I am sure you will enjoy them as much as I do: Read the rest of this entry »