After the tale of the fun, but sadly un-pitchable group press trip around Baden-Württemberg, Germany, I thought I’d follow it up with one of the best press trips of my entire life: a solo road trip stopping at some of the best places to visit in Colorado, with a focus…

Sixteen ill-equipped travel journalists drive nine, massive campervans in a convoy of RV travel around southern Germany. Travel journalists are frequently called upon to partake in new and strange activities while on press trips – and sometimes, when temporary insanity strikes, while on vacation. In more than a decade of…

What’s my problem now? If you’re new to this blog, what took you so long? Also, you may not know that I was a full-time, freelance travel writer for 13 years. This included many years researching and writing Lonely Planet guidebooks, which requires agonizing amounts of fact-checking, because if you…

One of the many dazzling enticements for getting into travel media is the idea of jetting around the world in luxurious style for free. The industry term for these free or sponsored trips is “fam trips,” A.K.A. “familiarization trips.” But those of us that have been on a bunch of…

And we’re back! This post is going to be a more useful, less goofball update to my original humor writing post from 10 years ago(!), called “How to write funny shit for your blog.” What makes me qualified to talk about humor writing in an authoritative manner? Pardon the humble-brag,…

I invited knower of many things, Tim Leffel, to be on my podcast this week to talk in depth about the state of travel blogging in 2021. This came about because Tim published a post called “Ideas Matter, But Successful Travel Bloggers Get The Work Done” on his Travel Writing…

Since its release in late-2016, it’s become a welcome tradition that I do an in-bookstore reading from Backpacking with Dracula each year around Halloween. That’s not happening this year, due to the U.S. transforming into a belligerent, failed, plague state, so I decided to do a reading via my very…

Travel writing is dead – long live travel writing I recently turned 50 years old. That’s right, I made it. Now that I’ve reached AARP eligibility, I feel I’ve earned the gravitas to espouse the old adage, exclusively disseminated by old people, that with age comes a practical wisdom that…

tl:dr The numerous flaws in TripAdvisor and Booking hotel reviews are dizzying and likely beyond rescue. I’ll preface this post by saying that I have no new hard evidence to present here. There’s no conclusive DNA test, no bloody murder weapon, and no one caught red-handed with 12 kilos of…

The landmark novel, Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, has proven to be as immortal as its vampire antagonist. May 26, 2017 marks the 120th anniversary of the novel’s publication, during which time it’s never been out of print, sparking a wildly prolific, vampire-fixated century in literature, stage, cinema and television. Eventually. [Large…