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.

Between moving out of Sarasota and traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday, I have been somewhat silent for the past two weeks. But things are settling down now and I can’t think of a better reason to get back into the swing than to tell you about a wonderful charity effort being mounted by my fellow travel writers through Passports With Purpose.

This year, the Passports with Purpose fund raising effort is supporting American Assistance for Cambodia (AAfC), an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving opportunities for the youth and rural poor in Cambodia, with a goal of raising $13,000 to build a school. In order to achieve this goal, travel bloggers have either personally donated prizes or arranged for companies to donate prizes. These items are then raffled off online, with each $10 donation entering the donor into a drawing for the prize of his or her choice.

Smiling children like this little girl hawk merchandise on the streets all day rather than attending school

I know first hand how much this is needed in Cambodia. When I visited the country in 2007, I was particularly struck by droves of children who roamed the streets, carrying baskets heaped with hand-made jewelry or toting hand-woven mats twice their size. Without exception, they interspersed pesky sales pitches and arm tugs with the few words of English they knew:

“Hello, where you from?”

“U.S.A.”

“Oh, U.S.A., A-Number one. President George Bush; capitol Washington, D.C.”

These children, some of them barely old enough to be left alone, much less on the streets all day selling merchandise, seemed desperate to learn. I can think of no better way to celebrate the holidays than to help build a school for these lovely children.

If you wish to join me in supporting this worthy cause, check out the list of prizes being offered at Passports With Purpose. Select the drawings you’d like to enter and indicate how many $10 donations you want to make for each prize. For example, I entered “3″ in the box to the right of the $100 Amazon.com gift card donated by Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just been notified that Hole In The Donut has once again been nominated for a “Love This Site” Award in the travel blog category at Divine Caroline. I was nominated last year as well and placed 10th; this year I’d love to be in the top three. To vote for Hole In The Donut as the best travel blog, go to DivineCaroline.com or click on the  Divine Carline badge in the right-hand sidebar. You must be registered to vote, but joining is free. Thanks in advance for your support!

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 »

BlogHer 2009, the quintessential gathering of women who blog, is over for another year. It was my first time at BlogHer and I was extremely impressed, although the whirlwind of keynote sessions, breakout panels, geek labs, leadership track training, exhibitions, and private parties left me exhausted.

Welcome session

The undisputed highlight of the conference was the Community Keynote, where 21 chosen BlogHer bloggers read their work. I laughed out loud as Danielle from KnottyYarn.com told us about forgetting to remove her tampon before having sex with her husband and then, when she couldn’t “find” the tampon, living in fear that she would die of toxic shock syndrome for five days before going to the doctor. It was especially amusing to me because the same thing happened to me, oh so many years ago, and it took me three days to “fish it out,” as Danielle’s doctor referred to the process.

Issa from Issa’s Crazy World stepped to the mike and, with wavering voice, related the story of her beloved uncle Marky, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and lived most of his life as a mentally unstable homeless person. Read the rest of this entry »

Great news! Devoted Hole In The Donut readers will never again have to worry about missing a post!

Look for the new “Get New Posts By Email” box on the very top of the right-hand sidebar. Enter your email address and click on the subscribe button. You will receive a confirmation email containing a link that must be clicked to verify your subscription. Once verified, you will receive an email notice each time I publish a post. Emails contains the title of the post, allowing you to decide if the content is something that would be of interest. You can also unsubscribe at any time by returning to the same box, entering your email address, and clicking on the unsubscribe button. Happy reading!

Thanks to Laura Lee over at Midlife Crisis Queen for her nomination of Hole In The Donut for a Splash Award!

The Splash is  given to alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive, and inspiring blogs.

In the spirit of the pass-it-along quality of the award, I invite you to visit the following blogs which I am nominating because I have found them to be well worth following:

• Random Thoughts From The Beach
• The Fabulous Geezersisters
• Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site
• Travel Wonders of the World
• Briefcase To Backpack
• What A Trip!
• DuchessOmnium – Island to Island

Note to nominees: The rules for a Splash Award are as follows:

The Splash Award is given to alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive, and inspiring blogs. When you receive this award, you should: 1. Put the logo on your blog (where do we find this logo to post?) 2. Nominate up to nine blogs that allure, amuse, bewitch, impress or inspire you 3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post 4. Let them know that they have been splashed by commenting on their blog 5. Remember to link to the person from whom you received your Splash award

If you have noticed the UpTake badge on my sidebar at the right, you may be wondering what that’s all about. UpTake.com is a travel search start-up company based in Palo Alto, CA. The company’s mission is to improve online travel searches by offering vacation information about where to go, what to do and where to stay within the United States from local travel experts and writers. And guess what  – I am one of those travel writers!

Today UpTake officially launched their Travel Blog Network, which provides travelers with the ability to browse and search expert blogs across six categories that include attractions, beaches, hotels, lodging, restaurants and travel industry news. I write for both the Attractions Blog and the Beaches Blog (anyone who know me is aware that I am addicted to beaches).

In preparation for the company’s announcement I provided them with a personal photo and a bio, which they then included in a major article about the launch of the network. I must admit that it is a bit unsettling to see my face plastered across the Internet – I really never expected that my writing would lead to me being promoted. But frankly, anything that provides me with a platform where I can write about travel and show off my photography makes me very happy!

Use UpTake to ferret out great travel destinations, hotels, restaurants, beaches, and attractions

The next time you feel the need to get away but just don’t know where to go, check out the blogs at UpTake.com. You’re sure to come away with some fascinating ideas for day trips, weekend getaways, or full vacations.