Have guitar, will travel.

I’m well aware that I haven’t written anything here for, well, ages! I’ve been focusing on a lot of other things, but rest assured I will be back here and re-launching World Troubadour before the year is out. From Nov my location independent life starts and I’m hoping that will mean plenty of travel stuff to write about. Anything else will be covered over at my main blog, Lifestyle Project.

Peace and Love,

Chris

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I’ve signed up for National Travel Writing month! This is quite a challenge, but the perfect way to kick start my attempt at passing myself off as a travel writer.

What is it?
National Travel Writing Month was created last year by Christine from the excellent Almost Fearless blog. The premise is to send 30 pitches in 30 days, this means sending query letters to editors to get them to commission writing from you. The aim is to get your work published, so you need to put yourself out there for the writing positions which will get you published and put money in your pocket, and published author credentials on your CV. The idea comes from National Novel Writing Month which occurs every November - I did contemplate doing that, but fiction really isn’t my thing at the moment.

Community
This time the site runs on the Ning social networking platform so there will be a lot of interaction and community encouragement throughout the challenge. I’m also assisting by running a twitter account to motivate and showcase the event.

Go For It
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can sign up at www.nationaltravelwritingmonth.com - at the very least you can encourage me along the way. I’ve got my Blues Tour at at the end of April to the beginning of May so hope to have plenty of things to write about along the way.

I’m off to brainstorm article ideas…

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I want to give a very quick introduction to my upcoming trip, currently codenamed ‘The Blues Tour’ - I’m sure I’ll come up with a better name at some point in the future.

The Trip
My dad turns 60 in March. To celebrate, he, my brother and I are doing a blues tour from Austin, TX to Chicago, IL. It’s a tight schedule packing in quite a distance in just two weeks.

Planning
We still have planning to do, but I’ve very excited. We’ll be taking in as many blues roots destinations as we can along the way, mainly:

• Austin
• Memphis
• Clarksdale
• Jackson
• Nashville
• Chicago

Image by handword

The route will follow (loosly), the old Route 61 which is the blues highway from New Orlean to Chicago. Famous sites include the Crossroads in Clarksdale where legend has it that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become a great guitarist. We also plan to visit the Gibson guitar factory (Nashville) and maybe even the Jack Daniels factory for a bit of Rock and Roll.

Road Trip
Road trips are something of a tradition in America so it seems, and I think we have great ingredients for a fantastic trip. I plan to blog and tweet along the way and hopefully do some good depth of writing on the experiences along the way.

More to follow on our plans, but if you have any tips to share please do let me know!

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There are many different types of traveller in the world, and some independent traveller types get very caught up on avoiding tourist traps. You know the type of person; they buy the lonely planet guide so they can avoid the places it recommends. The fact is that these tourist sites are popular for a reason, and that is because they are places people want to see. Sometimes it is necessary to go with the flow and allow yourself to blend in to the cameras, daypacks and conga lines of tourist parties.

I’d like to share a personal story, of a whistle-stop visit to the beautiful city of Venice. At the time we were staying on a much needed stress relieving holiday in Croatia, in Istra to be exact. This is in the North of Croatia, and on the border with Slovenia. Trieste in Italy is just a 100km away, and a day trip there sees you going through three countries in one day, which always sounds cool. Just across the sea however is Venice, it’s a two and a half hour boat ride from the port of Porec in Croatia and day trips operate all the time to this world famous destination. If you are going to visit Venice in a day, you have to be a tourist. To get there we went on a boat carrying three hundred or so other day trippers - this was going to be busy.

Soon after arrival on the boat, at the usual crack of dawn departure time, we were told to congregate downstairs for a talk about what we were going to see in Venice, there would also be important information about where to meet and departure times. What followed was a well refined, multi-lingual, tuned speech about how to make the best of your visit to Venice. Funnily enough this had a lot of additional services that the tour operator provided to make our trip easier. These included pre-arranged ‘heavily discounted’ gondola trips, a top notch meal, and a taxi boat back to our departure point. Like lambs to the slaughter, we were brainwashed in to buying the lot. After all we only had a few hours and Marco our guide was telling us how hard it was to find a cheap restaurant, how expensive a gondola was etc.

Here’s what happened: Off the boat we were to follow Marcos orange umbrella. He said “I walk at normal speed if you lose me it is not my fault” However, consider 300 people trying to follow a man with an orange umbrella whilst battling with the thousands of other people heading to the sites. What’s normal walking speed then if you don’t know where you are going? – Venice is a maze.

Arriving in St. Mark’s square the group was split to two guides, this is where we should have broken away and spent some time by ourselves but we had our Gondola appointment to meet, then a glass factory to visit (don’t ask) and then on to what turned out to be one of the worst restaurant’s in the world. We then had about ten minutes to ourselves before we were due at the meeting point for the taxi that would take us back to our departure point. TEN MINUTES. Those were the best times; we wandered down some back streets away from the ridiculous amount of people and had time (barely) to appreciate the buildings. Passing numerous quite outlets selling fresh reasonably priced sandwiches. Finding lunch hard? - I think not. Actually, think about it is there really any city where you can’t find food? No – don’t be scared in to thinking that it will be difficult.

Venice is like a theme park as it is, but this way of viewing it really left us frustrated that we didn’t see the place for all it’s merits. Those 10 minutes with just the two of us were fantastic, and we plan to go back in the future and find our own way round. Sure we might get lost, but that’s the whole point of travel isn’t it?

—

This post isn’t designed to stoke the tourist vs traveller vs cultural immersion debate - it’s more about me wanting to go back to Venice sooner rather than later!

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I suppose as a ‘travel blogger’, one should give you the reader an idea of my globe trotting.

Here’s a map of where i’ve been using the tripadvisor mapping tool I setup on facebook.

1. Sydney, Australia
2. Barcelona, Spain
3. New York City, NY, USA

• Create your own travel map or travel blog
• Travel Info at TripAdvisor

I’ll post another time about my carbon footprint (it does bother me).

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I enjoy setting up new blogs. In fact I enjoy it perhaps too much (considering I should be spending my time writing!). Actually, the fact that I like setting up blogs so much is on reason why I now offer it as a service (more details to follow).

In setting up this new blog, I wanted to encourage interactions and community from the get-go. With this in mind, I have done the following:

1. Installed the excellent CommentLuv plugin, so that anyone who already has a blog gets a link back to their latest post automagically.
2. Installed a Twitter ID plugin, that means if you leave a comment with an email linked to a twitter account it will stick a link to your profile in there. I like twitter, it makes me warm and fuzzy inside. There’s also a ‘Twit this’ plugin. I’ll see how that goes as it adds clutter.
3. I’ve whacked my links to my travel bloggin community interactions in the side bar.
4. I’ve stuck some of my favourite travel related blogs in my Blogroll. I’ll probably do a seperate links page in the future, but this will do for now.
5. From the start I want to encourage interaction and community in my posts. No plugin for that I’ll have to do that myself!

I hope you enjoy my new blog, and welcome to the community!

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