Last year, very soon after completing my road research in Romania and Moldova, I wrote this post literally giving away the greatest reality TV concept of all time, that being following around a Lonely Planet author. Bafflingly, no one has scooped up the idea yet, probably because it was so…

I promised you incoherent sentence fragments from the road when a free WiFi cloud and a toilet intersected, and by god I keep my promises. Though, to be honest, I wrote most of this on a bed in a two-star hotel, not the toilet, though I was tempted to stay…

Travel Writer Tip 152 – “How to eat dinner alone in a restaurant, while sitting front-and-center to an audience of 20 people standing in the rain waiting for tables and not look like a total jackhole” I got some quick on-the-job-training in this arena on my final night in Florence….

Have you ever had it where you plan your freelance travel writing career in absurd detail, spend weeks fine-tuning a masterful itinerary to hit six destinations in four countries on two continents (four of them being islands) without paying more than a grand total of 300 euros in transport, then…

I’m back in my Village of Solitude on the coast of western Sardinia – the place that timely bus service forgot – still shell-shocked and woozy from my trip to Umbria. As I reported previously, my Umbria research trip was gearing up to be an exhausting week of racing after…

I have a somewhat addictive personality.  This has manifested itself in a number of ways over the years:  juggling, girls, Jolt Cola, women, video games, babes, wine, Michelle Hunziker, travel and boobs.  Thankfully, somehow, I’ve avoided drugs or the only people reading my missives now would be abnormal psychology researchers,…

In our continuing coverage of dumbass blunders I’ve committed during my freelancing career, one of my budding gullibility lapses of all time is buying into the assumption that Italy has something approaching First-World internet service.  Now, I haven’t been to every corner of Italy, but judging from the parts I’ve seen,…

The Italian is not coming along as fast as I had hoped. I expected that I’d be speaking like Roberto Benigni in just a few days. Just review some grammar, get a fix on the accent, a few vocab adjustments here and there, zip-zop I speak Italian. But no. Unfortunately,…