My Latest Blog Has A New Flavor

I’m launching my new blog today. It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but I never set out to make it a showpiece work of online art. I just wanted a simple but functional place where I can write stories and display some photos about the life of a guy who decided to become a full-time solo traveler late in life.

But more than that, the idea is to make this blog a reader-involved prelude to a memoir I plan to write, where I will talk about ideas, philosophies and motivations for travel and how I came to be a full-time traveler after retiring in my mid-60s, when I could have stayed home in Hawaii and just taken it easy.

I’ve had a book about my travels in mind since I started planning this journey five years ago, and many of my friends have encouraged me to write one. But settling on a theme or narrative, a storyline, whatever you want to call it, has kept me occupied as I’ve been dawdling around trying to figure it out.

How It Started Coming Together

My friend Erica Virvo Hackman at The Nomadic Network helped put me on the right path back in November when preparing me for a Zoom presentation about my journey for the TNN travel site’s extensive audience of travelers.

“Talk about how you became a traveler,” she said. “What was it in your background that made you want to start traveling now. Talk about that.”

So I took her advice, though I really had to think and dig a little deeper into the past to dredge some of that up. But from the positive reaction I got from so many people who watched the presentation, I knew Erica had steered me in the right direction.

It started me thinking beyond just travel tales about destinations and dalliances that were fun but amounted to merely a collection of stories with little to hold them together.

I realized I needed to start folding my road experiences into the ingredients of my life to create a story with depth and meaning in the context of who I am.

That’s what I hope this blog will lead to — with your help.

Where you, the reader comes in

I want to make this blog a collaboration between author and audience, a reader-participation project. I will be experimenting and venturing off in different directions trying to find my voice and direction for the book I want to write. I’m counting on you, the reader, to let me know when I’m off key, or taking the wrong path, for the book you’d like to see me write.

I hope that we can have that discussion in these pages. I really want to hear your comments, criticisms, thoughts and prayers for my soul if need be. And together perhaps we can create a book that’s really worth publishing, not just another “Hey, look at me, I’m cool on the beach in (pick a destination)!” publication.

And a newsletter, too!

I will also have a regular newsletter that I hope you’ll sign up for. (Click on Newsletter in the menu above.) That will take care of the nuts-and-bolts travel info — where I am, where I’m going, and what I’m thinking and doing on the road — because I don’t plan for the blog to have that typical travel blog format. The newsletter will be more like an exclusive, personal letter to my subscribers, which I’m looking at issuing about every two weeks.

So if you’ve read this far I’m pleased you’re still with me. Now I’m hoping you’ll play an important part in my late-life, post-pandemic travels through our partnership in the making of this blog. I’m looking forward to your input.

The journey continues.