At the end of 2012, we headed to Hawaii for a week on Oahu. Shortly after we arrived there, my Dad died. I knew this was coming, but it was strange to see the fireworks over Waikiki on New Year’s Eve, so removed from what I was feeling at the time.
When you start the year wrapped in cognitive dissonance, it should not be surprising that your retrospective reflects a certain… oddity. This year is coming to a weird end too, with some financial stress caused by a slow fall income and dental care expenses roughly equivalent to the price of a used Toyota. Loss and financial woes are so very human, and I am tempted to make an apology for appearing to equate the two, but my readers are smart enough to know that I’m not making equivalencies so much as saying, “These things were hard.”
I’ve also found the web a difficult place this year. Frustrated by the continued shift around what it means to be a blogger, I dialed back significantly on my quest to get upstream, though this did not stop me from complaining about it a lot, to anyone that would listen and to some that probably wish I’d just STFU and get over my preaching from the self-proclaimed literary high ground. If all you people who think that blogging equals marketing and that content marketing is a good way to make money would get the hell off my lawn… Yeah, I gotta work on that.
But these difficult things sat side by side with many good things. Travels and visits from friends and publication credits and that time my cousin came to town and we watched the salmon fly out of the water in their not at all metaphoric journey. If the bank account is a little low and my family is smaller, it’s bigger, too, with the addition of those cousins I got when we lost my uncle. And there was so much music. My band made a CD which releases in January — that’s a very exciting way to start a new year.
One of the things I like about having a blog is that it allows me to look back and see what my year was like not in my memory, but as I documented it at the time. When I do that, as I have done nearly every December, I come out on the side of optimism. It’s not that there’s no bad news, it’s just that in spite of sadness and pain and the exorbitant cost of dental care in the US, there are things in my life that are nothing short of magical. And magic always wins.
January
I wrote about why I decided to stay in Hawaii instead of going to my father’s funeral. While it was a painful decision, it was not hard to make, and I’m so grateful to my brother for validating my choice over dinner a week, maybe two, after the ceremony.
February
I went to the Yukon on a small press trip that was built around the Yukon Quest, Canada’s epic dogsled race. There were some things I hated about this trip, so much so that I considered bailing out on the third day. But I’m glad I stuck with it because I got to meet the good people of the Dawson City Ukulele Club. The odds of that? So small as to be incalculable.
March
I mentioned my frustrations about the web. In March, after five successful years of helping shepherd the travel blogger driven fundraiser towards annual success, I resigned from Passports with Purpose. Keeping my hands off it (and my mouth shut) was not an easy thing to do this year, but it turns out I mean it about grass roots efforts.
That same month, as though the world knew I needed a consolation prize, I won a Solas Best Travel Writing Award for my essay about what it feels like to visit the last continent. I wrote that piece originally for this site, but sold it later to a magazine. The mag and my travel sponsors were so proud that I’d taken the award. As was I. What a thrill.
April
Something shifted with my band, The Castaways, things just snapped into place for us this year. Intellectually, I know this is the result of hard work and a certain cocktail of skills, but it feels like fairy dust sometimes. We have limited band drama and everyone is totally present. I know where I rank musical talent-wise with this crew and they still seem to be on board with acting as my personal School of Rock. We did three TV segments this year, starting with a live performance on New Day Northwest. Three TV segments! Jeez!
May
Avalon Cruises invited me to attend the inaugural sailing of one of their luxury river cruise ships. I’m not big on boats, but river cruising doesn’t make you seasick and, simply put, I was nosy — I wanted to know what this travel experience was like. Short answer: Freaking excellent. No really! Imagine, you’re in the same hotel every night but you wake up in a different city! I loved it. To keep everything in perspective, I brought my brother as the “plus one.” We hadn’t traveled together in a dog’s age and you know what? It was fun.
June
I went to TBEX, the Travelblog Exchange, to teach a writing class. I won’t lie, I had a hard time there. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the sessions I was part of and I love to teach writing. I Love It. But I found the shouty parties wearing, the complaints by bloggers just off press trips that bloggers are just in it for the press trips confusing, and the “You can live your dream life by quitting your day job!” subtext disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst. Let me again mention my frustration with bloglandia and my preference for small scale interactions.
TBEX 2013: Less Is So Much More
July
My mother-in-law and sister-in-law came for the best part of the summer and we took them out to the Olympic Peninsula. The Peninsula remains one of my favorite places on the planet. We planned the trip around the annual low tide and went tide-pooling at Beach Four. It was gorgeous. You should go.
The Olympic Peninsula: Four Photos
August
I was invited up to Alaska where I walked on a glacier, petted a musk ox, and got into the co-pilot’s seat in a flight-seeing plane and flew over Mt. Denali. I’m kind of a nervous flyer, I don’t love small planes (see also, I hate boats and get seasick) but I swallowed my nerves and was so glad I’d done so. I was surprised at how affected I was at getting to see the snow covered summit of this giant mountain.
September
August and September are great months to be in Seattle. And so, in Seattle we stayed. I napped in the hammock in the back yard, admired the abundant flowers on my dahlias, did some writing, went on walks down to the beach. There were no great trips, limited accomplishments, even less drama, and it was all very good.
October
The husband and I skittered down to Portland where we stayed in some nice downtown hotels, visited with friends, ate baked goods, and went to the Sherlock Holmes exhibit. One of the hotels was comped, one was media rate (a serious markdown), and we had a nice weekend away. Portland is great, you should go.
Stuff I Liked in Portland, Oregon
November
Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Best. Astronaut. Ever. A-hem.
Back in April, I started writing a series about Commander Chris Hadfield’s work on the ISS and his impact as a pop culture icon. And in November, I got to interview him, in person, in front of hundreds of people who were just as enchanted by him as I was. And no big deal, he agreed to play Rocket Man with me.
I will admit now that I was equal parts utterly star struck and so wanting to do a good job that I was hyper-focused on just getting it done. As a result, my front of mind memory of what actually happened is a little blurry. One of my friends said it was like the best day ever at school when the grown up with the cool job comes in and all the kids are rapt. I’m so glad there’s video.
A bunch of my Bay Area people came to the event and I was delighted to have them there.
December
Here we are. Here I am, pouring a early 90’s Corolla worth of cash into my mouth, picking up work for a few genuinely remarkable new clients and a some not new ones that I’ve loved working for. Here we are, eating cookies and drinking coffee and looking back thoughtfully thinking, oh, there were so many things in the year and perhaps I have had more than my share of magic and good fortune and getting as close to going to space as I will ever be.
What luck I have to live a life that works this way, where I can be in front of the camera with astronauts and musicians and in front of cocktails with friends and at the kitchen table with family and surrounded by so much stardust.
Here’s to 2014 and all its messy glory.
So how much of 2014 do you already have planned out for travel?
For the first year in many, I’m already planning a handful of trips to places I’ve either never been to or have not visited in years (including Abu Dhabi, Bangladesh, Weimar in Germany plus Glasgow and Liverpool in the UK.
What tends to be the driving force that makes you head to places, and where are you looking forward to visiting in 2014?
Happy travels, wherever you may go.
Save for a trip to Arizona with my family in January, I have nothing planned in advance. My finances took a terrible hit from some dental work, so travel is on the back burner while I recover from that. Also, I want to do less solo travel and get back to traveling with my husband — I miss that — and that could change what we decide to do. It’s time for us to visit the in-laws in Austria again, so we’ll likely do that, but it’s not clear when.
I guess the answer to your driving force question — a good one — is that right now, it’s family, but given a limitless budget, the things that interest me are places with old stones and ancient cultures (Egypt, Angkor…) or places that are culturally complicated, right now, I’m really keen to get to Japan because I like the idea of being lost in a place where I don’t speak the language at all.
Thanks for the well wishes, Stuart, and for dropping by.
And what are your expectations in 2014?
My expectations are following:
1- I think to visit my family who live in Germany- Hamburg. (Actually there is something called Skype but i miss them, so it does’nt satisfy me.
2- A Cruise travel to Italy. There are many places i want to see like Mliano and Venice.
3- Caribbean trip that includes Havana(what a nice place)
I think your 2013 was not weird but cool!
Please don’t give up the literary high ground. I’ve perused many blogs and blog marketing articles, and came across piles of stinky crap. I need good writers like you to bulldoze the piles out of my way from time to time.