I was cold, often, especially my feet, even though I had packed appropriately. I was damp around the edges from the intermittently bad weather. I was queasy from time to time, either from long hours in the car or bus, or from a knee jerk nervous reaction to the tiniest mid-air shuffle by the bush plane. I was tired from sleeping in lots of different beds — one night the upstairs neighbors seemed to be wearing their boots at all hours, another night the hallway of the hotel filled with Portuguese speakers twice, once around 2am, again around 4am. I was occasionally offended — the Alaskans we encountered were not the least bit shy about their politics. On top of all that, I often had a bit of a belly ache, probably from drinking too much coffee, a poor attempt at offsetting the bad sleep, long hours of activity, and mental overload. And still, every day, I thought, “I can’t believe I’m here.”

It’s a little bit fashionable for some travel writers to bash the press trip. Critics imagine that press trip participants are coddled like visiting royalty, every moment of their experiences controlled. There are cocktails and suites and fees are waived. There are fruit and cheese plates and notes from the management and “if there’s anything you need, anything we can do, just let me know, here’s my direct line.” The stuff that results can read like advertising, insipid floral copy espousing the exact same virtues included in the destination’s brochure copy. Yawn. It’s also fashionable to be a bit of a beleaguered travel writer, suffering under the market pressures of abominably low pay in exchange for long hours, many of which are lost to that no man’s land of transit. All travel has a measure of weariness in it. Whatever.

But consider the incredible privilege of being a travel writer. We go places and write about them! Sometimes, we go places that others only dream of and we’re invited to go to those places on someone else’s money. Even when we pay for it ourselves, if we successfully sell a story, we are being paid to talk about our last trip. It’s a stupid analogy, but I’m going to make it all the same — imagine that old fashioned idea of submitting to your neighbor’s slide show of their summer trip to Yellowstone. Now imagine giving them cash for the honor of sitting on their couch and eating their potato chips while looking at smudgy photos of bison and landscape.

I have been laid low by the blues of crappy pay. And I have been lathered into a foamy state by the arguments around press trips. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to get bogged down in the navel gazing discussions about, well, all kinds of superfluous crap.

But check it out. Last week, from the copilot’s seat in a bush plane, I watched a moose take a bath in a pond. I stood on a glacier drinking hot tea while watching a black bear wander off into the woods. I shivered in my muddy shoes in a tiny town just north of the Arctic Circle while hearing stories about subsistence living in winter. I’ve done other stuff on press trips too; I’ve played music with a lovely Hawaiian auntie and spent the day with an extended Mexican family and yeah, I’ve stayed in some fancy suites and had some fruity cocktails. I enjoyed that; I’d be lying if I said otherwise.

I got to do all this stuff because I’m a travel writer. Don’t mistake my tone here. I’m not saying “Nyah, nyah, look at me!” Far from it. I’m saying this: “I can not believe I get to do this. I am am the luckiest person in the whole entire world. I’m a travel writer. How amazing is that?”

I’ve attended what feels like a pile of conferences this year — SxSW, TBEX, BlogHer, BlogWorld Expo, reThink Hawaii was the last in a long run. Unfortunately, it solidified something for me that I’ve been slowly concluding with each event that I attend — I don’t thrive in these environments. I’m not particularly shy, but I don’t like to do things in large groups. I’d really prefer to have dinner with two or three smartypants types, being in a room with 100 of them just isn’t that rewarding for me.

I can’t work a room. That’s not to say that I don’t want to meet you, it’s rather that I don’t have the skills to compete for your attention, a cheerier extrovert will do a much better job than I will and because of that, we probably won’t talk unless I sit next to you at breakfast or in those funny between times when everyone is elsewhere. I’m happiest in quiet conversation in a room where I can hear you. Though ironically, I have loved the speaker opportunities I’ve had this year, so I guess I like the spotlight when I don’t have to compete for it. How lazy is that?

All of this is just so you can place my experience in context. Bookish type, kind of a nerd, socially not that great, especially  in a room full of  extroverted success stories. Yeah, not so much my scene. I’m going to sit over there and observe, quietly, and process, thank you, and I probably won’t show up to shout at you in a noisy bar later, I’ll be in my room, reading and eating take out bento.

This doesn’t mean I’m not absorbing information or learning or making some good connections.  I was able to connect with some great people in the pantheon of Internet stars that attended and plan to follow up with a few — they’re doing work directly related to things that I’m doing. I loved the local presence — reThink and TEDx gave me the chance to spend quality time with people who live and work in Hawaii and I adore those folks, they’re wonderful. I’ve never felt so at home while living out of a suitcase. All that fuzzy stuff, the stuff around the edges, that was great.

But I was struck, repeatedly, but what was NOT talked about at both reThink Hawaii and TEDx. My short list:

• Tourism: A lot of time was devoted to discussing sustainability, a critical issue with Hawaii’s limited resources. But we didn’t talk about tourism until I asked. This wasn’t a tourism or travel event, but with 800,000 people passing through the islands every year, including many of the people in that room, not talking about tourism seemed to willfully deny one of the biggest impacts to Hawaii’s economy and environment.
• Education:  I attended more than one talk that mentioned how Hawaii could be the “Silicon Valley of energy” and how it’s got great potential as a business environment. While I sat in that room, restless teenagers sloped about the streets of Waikiki because of Hawaii’s embarrassing furlough Fridays — the state doesn’t have the funds to keep the kids in school full time. Skilled jobs in Hawaii are badly needed, but who’s going to do those jobs if Hawaii residents aren’t getting a quality education?  For personal reasons, I’d love to see a Hawaii tech corridor, but that’s because I want to live there. Is Hawaii creating the skilled workforce needed to fill those jobs once they’re created or are they going to go to lucky imported mainlanders?
• Censorship: I really enjoyed Kaiser Kuo’s talk about our difficult relationship with China via the Internet, but I have a hard time removing the shadow of censorship from the conversation. I don’t understand the first thing about China. But I know that my friend B, when traveling there, couldn’t share his stories with me via his blog, he was blocked by what is amusingly called the Great Firewall of China. There’s a lot of excitement about China’s opening markets, but when it comes to open communication, what’s available to us as citizens? How much of the tone of the conversation with the outside world is controlled by the government? China certainly has the manpower to apply a heavy hand when it comes to censorship — are they? I don’t know.
• Consumerism: I’m not really anti-consumer, I like my stuff just fine, but I sure wish we’d dial it back some as a society. I was frustrated by Henk Rogers talk about the new virtual world. It’s just one tiny thing, but he mentioned how virtual worlds make it easier for us to get virtual stuff. He’s also got the Blue Planet Foundation, an organizaiton that wants to end the use of carbon based fuels. That’s great, but isn’t the drive for stuff what causes us to burn all that carbon based fuel? Is the ability for us to get virtual stuff really going to diminish our desire for real stuff, or is it going to frustrate us, making us wonder why we can’t have that stuff in real life? Again, I don’t know.
  [Related side note: I REALLY appreciated that reThink and TEDx were swag free. Swag is fun, but when an event becomes more about swag than substance... TBEX did a nice job of making sure everyone got the same stuff and that it wasn't just stuff.]
• Success: Wow, there were a lot of very successful people there. And that’s really great for them, but for me, a person of a modest (but really very amazing life) I felt like the lessons of failure were eclipsed by the glamor of success. The most valuable stories are in lessons learned from failure, but I felt like I was hearing a lot of glowing reports on how awesome things were.  A lot of success models aren’t replicable — they’re a magical cocktail of inspiration and work and luck and connections. But failure is a unifying experience and it’s a good thing to learn how to fail without giving up. I realize that’s vague, but I loved beatboxboy Jason Tom’s remark about successful people failing more often. Sharing the failure factor? I would have like to see more of that.

The networking aspects aside, I suppose if Neenz and Christine Lu intended to send attendees out into the world thinking differently about, well, a few things, then I’m probably a fair argument for their success. I’m still rolling these issues around in my head. I dont have any real conclusions at this point, but I’m thinking, thinking and rethinking, a lot, about the last ten days in Hawaii.

The following additional rules apply to travel writers, whether working for Travel, Escapes, T: Travel or any other section:

No travel writer, whether on assignment or not, may accept free or discounted services of any sort from any element of the travel industry. This includes hotels, resorts, restaurants, tour operators, airlines, railways, cruise lines, rental car companies and tourist attractions…

It is our policy not to give Travel assignments to freelance writers who have previously accepted free services. Depending on circumstances, the Travel editor may make rare exceptions, for example, for a writer who ceased the practice years ago or who has reimbursed his or her host for services previously accepted…

When the story broke, travelers on Twitter manned their keyboards and there was a lively debate — here’s the #twethics (travel writer’s ethics) archive, if you’re interested.

Yes, it’s not unusual for travel writers — for well known writers of any stripe — to be invited on a trip with the implied agreement that they’ll write about it. Yes, there’s some question about how truly objective a writer can be when they’ve taken a trip that was fully funded by a tourism or travel organization. Yes, pay for travel writing these days is rarely enough to cover the expenses of travel, it’s rarely enough to turn a profit.

Are you getting 100 dollars a post — enough to cover dinner and one night in a hotel you scored on Priceline? Are you getting 1200 dollars for a feature story about a far away place — enough for a round trip ticket from the West Coast to Europe and a cup of coffee in the airport? Let’s widen the circle a little bit — are you buying every single one of those gadgets you review? Did you pay for that makeup/clothing/shoes/kitchen appliance/gaming device with your own cold hard cash and did your writing income cover the costs?

I think this entire debate is beside the point. Albo seems to have broken the terms of his contract by taking the trip. That’s a business/contractual issue. But for me, the heart of this debate is the story that results from participating in a comped adventure. What’s the story about? Is the writer offering critical insight into the destination? Is the writer giving you useful, actionable tips for a better trip? Are you reading a story that transports you to a place? Are any reviews practical, complete, and thoughtful? Or are you reading the same information you can get from the brochure stand in the airport? Is the resulting story nothing more than the PR company’s copy, a first person rewriting of what’s on the hotel or attraction web site? Regardless of who’s paying, what am I reading as a result?

It’s increasingly easy to be taken seriously by the entities that finance these trips. PR companies are interested in the high traffic numbers of group blogs, advertisers are looking to replace the fading print market with blog advertorials. They make their choices, send out some invites, and wait, hopefully, for the resulting wave of click throughs and conversions. The issue that came up again and again at the blogging plus travel events I attended this year was “How do I get one of those trips?”

I’d like to see more people asking “How do I write a good travel story?” My inbox is littered with PR pitches for travel related events. Odds are fairly high that I can tell if your post is sourced in one of those; odds are equally high that I can tell if you’re on a comp, even if you haven’t disclosed that fact. Ultimately, I don’t actually care who paid for your trip. I care that the result is a well written story, critical and insightful.

In a perfect world, a travel writer could travel anonymously on an expense account and make a decent income from their stories — but we all know that’s just not true for so many writers these days. Press junkets and PR funded travel is part of the game now. We need to get used to that. And while I do think disclosure is a good policy for bloggers, it’s ultimately up to the publication or the individual to decide. But I don’t think participation in press trips immediately dings a writer’s cred.

I’m not going to go after anyone because they’ve taken a free trip. Write poorly as a result of that opportunity, now that’s when the gloves come off.

Related, sort of:

• NYT Nitpicker: Why not give Mike Albo a break?
• Gadling: Free press travel necessary… and certainly not an evil.
• Miss Adventures: Of freelance writers and junkets
• Matador: Do Travel and Leisure-style ‘No Freebies’ Policies Undermine Honesty in Travel Writing?

Not only did Sean not give me a hard time, but he helped connect the dots to set us — three bloggers on a road trip to Chicago for TBEX — up with a Routan minivan for our adventure. Talk about a good sport. Sean took time to answer a bunch of questions about PR and bloggers and how that relationship works. I did a series of these as part of our road trip, you’ll find the rest here. If you’re a blogger struggling with the hows and whys of PR relationships, they are an interesting read.

Below the jump — Sean’s answers to my questions.

What does a “good” blogger looks like to you? Are there any consistent characteristics in the bloggers you choose to work with?
When I (or any Promotions Associates at New Media Strategies) seek-out bloggers to work with on any campaign, regardless of the scope of work, I look for the most accurate blog to fit that clients’ needs, while ensuring that the content benefits the blogger as much as possible. NMS always makes sure we’re about quality relationships…so while high-reaching blog metrics are great to see, I would happily work with a smaller blog if it made sense to our campaign and genuinely helped the blogger out.

What makes you decide to give resources to a blogger?
Back to relationships – you have to know the blogger and know their style and, of course, having the right resources makes all the difference. Offering assets and premiums to partner blogs not only helps increase the quality of the post on their site, but also ups my client’s ability to get the word out. Not to mention, NMS encourages active participation within the blogosphere (almost everyone here blogs in some way or another) and in social networking space (I think we may all be on Twitter now). When we get the right resources to the right blogger, that helps everyone involved, including that blog’s readers.

How do you vet a blogger? Do you look at their traffic, their Technorati ranking, or other statistics?
As mentioned before, my work at New Media Strategies has taught me that it is more important to find relevant and credible blogs than to simply go hunting for the biggest numbers. If I find a set of 50 blogs that all perfectly fit my clients’ needs, I will obviously look to the metrics (which includes Compete, Technorati and other online traffic measurements), but will also look at the quality of the content on those 50 blogs and how well it appears that blogger has worked with partners in the past.

How should a new blogger approach you?
If a blogger is ever interested in working with me, they need only shoot me an email relaying their interest on a subject I work on. At New Media Strategies, we feel pretty strongly that quality relationships with our blog partners are important, and that’s a real two-way street. And since nearly everyone at NMS has experience in blogging, we understand the needs and etiquette of the blogosphere… so any blogger interested in working with me and my clients is encouraged to send me an email and let me know: scarroll(at)newmediastrategies(dot)net!

Note: I checked with Sean, he means it. Drop him a line.

What do you want to know from someone who’s starting out and would like to build a relationship with you?
Off the bat, I would want to know the person’s name, their site’s name, URL and then their interests. I have yet to encounter a blog/blogger that just won’t work. So once I have that basic information, we can go from there. If the blogger wants to get an idea of the type of clients we work with, he or she can visit the New Media Strategies website, here: http://newmediastrategies.net/about/timeline/. We have a very diverse set of clients so we really can accommodate nearly any bloggers’ personal preference.

What should bloggers ask you for? What should they NOT ask you for?
Bloggers can honestly feel free to ask me for anything and I’ll always do my best to accommodate their wishes. As such, asking me for information on current promotions is probably the best way to start. Once we’re working on something, asking me about assets and premiums, as well as client background and information…all of that is relevant and expected.

What’s the best way for a blogger to catch your interest when they’re contacting you directly?
Honestly, I live for developing these types of relationships. From the get-go, when I started at NMS in 2003, it has ALWAYS been about getting to know people online and finding ways to work together. So bloggers don’t have to do anything special to catch my interest. As long as they are interested in creating a mutually beneficial relationship, that’s all that matters to me.

Do you receive a lot of sponsorship requests and what percentage of those do you say yes to?
The sponsorship requests have definitely increased as of late with the increased participation in blogger conferences and events. I’m happy to help in any way that I can with sponsorships, but it often comes down to what is available and what can be done. If I’m approached about sponsorship, I’ll do anything I can to help.

What do you expect from a blogger in exchange for your product or service?
When I set up a relationship with a blogger, all I expect is respect and understanding. Any time I approach a blogger on a new promotion, I make sure they’re going to benefit from the partnership…be it content, prizing, reviews, events…you name it. If a blogger is interested and agrees, having previously discussed the parameters of the promotion, all I expect is that they stay true to our original agreement. I think the only “bad” thing that has ever happened was when a blogger backed out of a commitment they had made. That makes it extremely difficult for me to do my job…but again…this comes back to respect and understanding.

What do you do if a blogger negatively reviews the product or service you represent?
Actually, I have yet to find myself in that position. I think the reason for that is because New Media Strategies makes every effort possible to ensure that our blogging partners are benefiting from our relationships. If we are coming to a blogger with something that we think will be received negatively, then we aren’t doing our jobs very well.

What do you have to show your boss as results for supporting a blogger?
Boss, client, CEO…all they want to see is that all parties involved benefited from the partnership and that the time and resources of our client were well utilized. Again, New Media Strategies believes that all blogs, big or small, regardless of theme, should be involved in these partnerships and promotions.

Briefly, give us the elevator pitch for you and your company.
New Media Strategies is the industry pioneer in online brand promotion, protection and intelligence. We work with all kinds of clients through a number of verticals and make it our goal to treat every blog, blogger, community and online consumer with the utmost respect. New Media Strategies is all about genuine relationship-building and walking the walking, not just talking the talk…which is why we are the successful industry pioneer that we are.

A big thanks to Sean. And really, you should read the rest of these, again, they’re here. They’re great insight in to why PR wants to work with YOU, travel blogger.

But though my phone rang with concerns for my safety and well being — I was clear the other side of the country! — though my neighbor and I sat, stunned, and watched over and over as the smoke rose, as the text across the bottom of my TV stated that two other planes were “missing”, though I could not believe my eyes, it was not right then that I felt the change. It was not until I headed to the airport eight, or maybe twelve weeks later that the feeling of something lost crept up the back of my neck and settled on me, right there in the departures terminal. I have never enjoyed flying, but I have also never been afraid. And in December, 2001, for the first time in life, I was afraid to fly.

I do not wish to belittle the tremendous loss felt by the families who lost those they loved on September 11th. I can not express my sympathy, still, for their pain and my hope that some day, justice will be served. My loss, this minor shift in feeling, is insignificant, it’s nothing in the face of the gaping holes where fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and lovers and friends used to stand. The change for me is a small one, a falling out of love, the disappointment of a broken heart, the tarnishing of something that once seemed valuable. But it’s my loss, it’s the one I know, the one I can speak about.

September 11 changed travel. Not just for me, but for everyone, everywhere in the world. I saw it in 2008 when I handed over an unopened bottle of water that I’d purchased on the wrong side of the gate in Bangkok. I saw it last month when my sister in law, visiting from Europe, described the complicated visitor registration process she had to go through. I saw when, in 2006, rushing to make a connecting flight in London, the airlines staff raced me to the gate only to call me to a full stop to remove my shoes. I saw it in May when I dropped my husband off and was bullied on the airport drive for sitting too long in one place. My friend with the generic name who’s on the no-fly list sees it. My Indian friend who’s always pulled aside for special screening sees it. My house guests who arrived last weekend — via a domestic flight — without toothpaste see it. It is everywhere, this blanket of security wrapped around travel, designed to make us believe that there are those out to get us and those who are working hard to keep us safe.

I never minded the steely faced interrogators at the departures gate in Amsterdam or Munich because everyone got the same treatment but I hated — I still hate — taking off my shoes and pouring out my soda. In Molokai’s tiny airport, I handed my unopened drink to some loitering taxi drivers rather than throw it away before being liberated of my sunscreen ten minutes later by a security guard. I’ve watched frustrated mothers in London hand over items that they’d been given on their previous flight because they weren’t allowed into the arrivals terminal. I’ve watched young guys in desert garb singled out for special screening and I’ve been pulled into that line myself.

After 9/11, Americans everywhere put their international holidays on hold. I flew anyway, holding my breath, eying the other passengers, thinking of the words of our former county executive, Ron Sims, who spoke at a rally I attended shortly after 9/11. “No man can cause me to fear my neighbor,” he said, and I hoped that was the case but I knew it wasn’t true any more because there I was, afraid for the first time since I’d walked solo in the Himalayas, since I woke up completely off the grid in Pakistan, since I wandered the streets of Alexandria, lost. I had never been afraid and there I was, in the departures terminal in Seattle’s airport, afraid.

All the details in air travel conspire to remind us that we are afraid. The theater of security, the zip-lock bags, the piles of half empty water bottles. The bins of discarded items, too sharp to take on the plane, the passengers in their socks repacking their electronics. You, hipster guy next to me in line for that flight to Austin, you are an object of fear. You, 70-something guy clearing security in Tucson, unraveling your complicated back brace, because it contains metal stays, you are an object of fear. Girl in skinny jeans and Converse high tops, Russian family with complicated luggage, nursing mother, all of you, everyone in line is a suspect until security tells us otherwise. You are an object of fear.

There are, I’m sure, sophisticated reports that tell us exactly how much money was lost in travel since 9/11. We can probably find data that lists the number of canceled trips, of vacant hotel rooms, of airline seats left empty. There are numbers that will tell us how many security officers have been hired and how many Swiss Army knives have been confiscated. But there’s no measure for this tiny loss, this cumulative fear. Yes, everything changed in that instant, of course it did, how could anyone think otherwise? It didn’t stop there, though, with this catastrophic lurch in American society. It continued, a gradual erosion of optimism, a cliched loss of innocence.

It feels so long ago, I am older now. I will not see Afghanistan in this life, I will not see Baghdad. I doubt I will make that magical drive across the deserts of Persia, the Silk Road doesn’t seem to be in my future anymore. I have to wait for my next life as an Arabic nomad, as a different wanderer than I am today. For now, when I travel, I face my fear. I am afraid. I go anyway; I take my fear with me. This is what has changed. It is nothing, I know, but it is my loss. A slow shift, a minor weight, a broken heart.