What It’s Like to Be a Travel Writer…

I’ll be speaking from 7 – 8 pm at the New Westminster location of Douglas College. Joe Wiebe teaches writing there and has asked me to come speak to his class about travel writing.

I’ve been to two of his classes now and did the same thing on a panel at UBC, the one at Daniel Wood’s writing class at SFU and was part of the panel at Word on the Street last fall…

But still, I’m always a little flummoxed as to what exactly to tell them.

There is such a silly amount of hype around the whole thing.

Perhaps I’ll just start with the usual thing about how I sort of fell into the thing because I submitted a Reader’s Postcard piece to the Vancouver Sun and won an umbrella. Then I submitted to another conblog and won a suitcase!

Well, stop the presses, it sort of got me thinking. What if I got some cash along with the suitcase and the umbrella? Clearly I could go anywhere that way.

The umbrella got pretty tatty looking, and, in fact, I think it’s long ago disappeared into the pile at the hospital auxiliary thrift shop. 

The suitcase is in the basement somewhere, buried under the new lightweight, wheelie carry-on models that are my preferred mode of travel.

Maybe I’ll regale them with tales of last September’s stay at the Prague Buddha Bar Hotel with the remote control bidet…always a crowd-pleaser.

Or maybe I’ll just talk about the photo I’ve posted here, because it’s a lot more representative of things I do.

This is an interior shot of the Flying Star Restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I just ate there the other night with my new friend June Jackson. 

Apparently, there are seven Flying Stars in Albuquerque and two more around the state of New Mexico.

This location, at Silver & 8th, was great fun and served up mostly pretty healthy food (with the exception of the to-die-for dessert and baking displays).  We got there around 8 or 9 pm and the steady line of customers never let up.

It’s all set up with good prices and a cafeteria-style system.  We both had the Buddha Bowl and it was a lovely rice dish with piles of fresh veggies in a tasty sauce. I asked the manager how many plates they put through ..1900/week. 

It was a great contrast to the piles of gooey nachos I’d been eating all week in Taos.

It wasn’t quite as glam as the Buddha Bar, but it felt like we were getting into a very real slice of Albuquerque.

And isn’t that the goal of travel? Trying to navigate our way into the heart and centre of things?

Maybe that’s what I’ll tell them. Don’t do this for the big bucks – because there really isn’t any.  Do it if you want to get out there and then…once you’re there…to go into the experience as deeply as possible.