{"id":3605,"date":"2010-09-05T10:17:39","date_gmt":"2010-09-05T17:17:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=3605"},"modified":"2010-09-14T10:12:11","modified_gmt":"2010-09-14T17:12:11","slug":"exhausted-underpaid-ecstatic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/05\/exhausted-underpaid-ecstatic\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhausted, Underpaid, and Ecstatic"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent the last ten days in Alaska on a press trip. The trip was fully funded by Travel Alaska<\/a> and managed by Thompson and Co PR<\/a>. There were four media types (including myself) on the trip and two patient, well organized, and — bonus — fun young women from the PR company. They kept us on schedule, well fed, hydrated and safe for the duration of the trip and they made us laugh, often. It was an amazing trip — almost every day felt like a once in a lifetime experience and almost every day, at some point during the day, I would either think or say out loud to one of my companions, “I can not believe I get to do this. I can not believe I am on this trip.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

\"Blur\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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

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<\/a> and spent the day with an extended Mexican family<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent the last ten days in Alaska on a press trip. The trip was fully funded by Travel Alaska and managed by Thompson and Co PR. There were four media types (including myself) on the trip and two patient, well organized, and — bonus — fun young women from the PR company. They kept … <\/p>\n


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