Adelaide, located on Australia’s southern coastline a mere 124 miles (200 kilometres) northwest of Melbourne, is one of Australia’s hidden gems. It might have a population of over 1 million, but Adelaide is, as Bill Bryson wrote in his book In a Sunburnt Country, “…the most overlooked of Australia’s principal cities …” It seldom gets a mention in the national media. And it’s often bypassed by tourists who flock instead to Sydney, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast.

In short, it’s a city seldom thought of. And that’s a shame really because, as I discovered on a recent four day visit, Adelaide has a lot going for it.

Wanting to find out as much about Adelaide as possible in the short time we were here, I had organized to be shown around by a tour guide from Our Explorer.com. The plan was to take a walking tour around the central city, learning not only about it’s history but also about it’s green sustainability practices. But an unexpected heatwave, with temperatures in the high 30’s and low 40’s Celcius put paid to that idea.

Instead,  we hopped onto Tindo, the free Solar Bus which offered not only air conditioning but a great overview of Adelaide. Gary Locke from Our Explorer provided a running commentary, pointing out various landmarks around the city, including the new green Convention Center on the banks of the River Torrens.

Along the way, I learned that unlike most of Australia’s large cities, Adelaide had been built by immigrants instead of convicts. And build they did, as is evident by the number of  Victorian buildings scattered around the city and  historic churches on every other street corner. But it wasn’t all about building.  More than  45% of the city was designated as green space, ensuring plenty of gardens, parks, and sports fields for residents to enjoy.

 I also discovered that the Adelaide Zoo was being upgraded to accommodate two Pandas due to arrive from China later this year (Note to self – return to Adelaide next year to visit with Pandas).

An hour later, we were back where we had started from and I had a much clearer understanding of not only what makes Adelaide special (beautiful buildings and wide open green spaces) but also the best places for food (the Central Market), drink (The National Wine Center of Australia), and, more importantly, where to find shade (any large tree in the Botanic Gardens). 

(Disclaimer: The OurExplorer tour guide was provided by the company free of charge)

Soul Travelers 3, a family of 3 from Santa Cruz, California, now blogging from their travels around the world, have won a free copy of the South Africa Literary Traveler’s Companion with their comments on how children’s literature have inspired many of their travels.

There were several interesting thoughts about the literary inspiration behind travel urges. Caitlin Fitzimmons, who writes the fantastic Roaming Tales blog, mentioned The Wind in the Willows and Oxfordshire, and her desire to visit Prince Edward Island in Canada due to the lovely L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables books (which were what got me to visit the island, too — twice!).

Vera Marie Badertscher said that a combined love of literature and travel was behind her blog A Traveler’s Library (where she will be writing more about the same topic), and the mind behind The World in a Satin Bag touched on my own interests with a love of science fiction and fantasy novels building a craving to see real castles.

I loved how Soul Travelers 3 combine great stories and travel to bring the world to their 5-year-old to the world and the world to her:

“We don’t have that much space, so we often end up reading her books too. Her Odyssey books really made our travels to troy and all through Greece, so much richer as we all got into Homer online as well.Perhaps we never would have visited Troy or Mycenae without that influence.

Recently we went to Krakow, and the award winning Trumpeter of Krakow set us all up nicely for that visit. We all loved Bram Stoker’s Dracula too that was meant to give a kid a bit of excitement for Romania, but I broke my arm in Melk before we got there this year.”

Thanks to everyone who participated, and keep reading and traveling!

I see it in the packed social media-related workshops and presentations at travel and tourism industry conferences.

I see it in my email IN box, overflowing with “Look! Here!” pitches from every travel-related marketer you can imagine.

I see it in advertising campaigns like Starbucks VIA instant coffee, which distributed their product to travel bloggers in hopes that the bloggers would talk about it.

The marketing and public relations din has only grown louder – is your decibel meter picking it up?

They want what bloggers have.

They want access to our “authenticity,” our “communities” and our “conversations.”

They want access to our Twitter networks (so they host us on Twitter cruises.)

They want us to talk about them and link to their Web sites.

They want us to be their Fans on Facebook.

They’re realizing how much travel-related video gets uploaded to YouTube every day.

Bloggers, wired writers, new media….whatever you want to call us, we’ve gone from marginal to magnificent in the nearly four years since I launched my first travel blog.  It’s been an interesting shift to watch; as a writer who prefers to publish online but would like to be paid decently for that work, I never forget what businessman David Bullock said to us at a Chicago blogging conference a couple of years back:

“We want what you have, what you have right in your DNA….the ability to communicate on the Web. Don’t ever sell yourself short. We WILL pay you for it.”

Don’t get me wrong;  I’m a marketer, too.  I make money teaching tourism people how to access people like me.  They want to know. They have stories to tell about their destinations, and they’re seeing that this is the “new” way to tell them.  That’s great, as long as they also understand that (most of us) are not in it with any expectations of making big money.

I blog and connect and exchange ideas with you down in the comments because I love to travel and talk about travel with others.  I’d do it even if I wasn’t paid; in fact, that’s exactly how I started.

It’s rather ironic to enjoy this suddenly-elevated view from the catbird seat – by doing what we love, without any particular expectations, the class nerds are now in the running for Prom Queen.

We already “get it.”  We already know how to connect with like-minded folks in an organic way, using the same free/low-cost social media tools that some corporate marketing departments are just figuring out.  We may not have deep pockets, but we are more nimble and have more room to be creative.

Even backpackers can rock the social Web to market their travel dream, and a small Dutch company can put together one of the first AR (Augmented Reality) mobile apps for city travel before the biggies have figured out what hit them.

So, thanks so much for reading and supporting this blog over the years. Thanks for reading our “parent,” the excellent Perceptive Travel webzine (which is going strong because no, the travel narrative is NOT dead.)

By reading our posts and keeping me, Nia, Alison, Liz and Tim company with your links, comments and stories, you’re auto-magically in the right place at the right time in travel and Web history.

I was so inspired by Alison’s essay yesterday on First Travel Memories that I spent last night’s free time thinking of all the travel journals I’ve started and discarded, all the way back to the very first.

When my family moved to the Soviet Union, my parents’ boss’s wife sent me off with a cheap 3 X 5 spiral notebook where I could record all my “experiences.” (In the months preceding this move, everyone we met told my younger sister and me “what an experience” we were going to have, and we got heartily sick of the phrase. Even a 14-year-old and a 9-year-old know an ignorant cliche when they hear one.) The notebook had a bright green plastic-style cover with Snoopy on the front.

It wasn’t until we arrived in Moscow (by overnight train from Helsinki) and had spent an extremely disorienting couple of weeks that I realized that notebook might be of tremendous use. Because it was, in fact, all quite an experience. My sister and I were dropped every morning at a building down the road from where our parents were working so we could take extremely tedious 3-hour Russian lessons. When they were over, we were free to roam Moscow as we chose, as long as we didn’t get lost. Mostly we wandered around peering into army garrisons and looking for food, following the scent of fresh bread and any line that formed to purchase, say, sausage, or Pepsi. (I still try to imagine letting my own children do this in a huge foreign city, especially in the age long before cell phones, and just can’t.)

So I started very properly with the title, “What It’s Really Like to Live in Russia.” Perfectly explanatory.

I wrote so much in that journal, or I remember doing so. Because sometime in a subsequent house move in Montana the journal was lost, and with it the close tangibility of many of those memories.

There are few things in life I regret more than the loss of that journal. So many times I’ve attempted to write and rewrite and narrate those stories, but the immediacy slips away as I dig in unreliable memories and wish repeatedly for a notebook to refer to. Reading Alison’s story based on her first travel experience bought the taste of those times back to me, and the flavor of travel memories committed to paper and kept forever.

I haven’t made the mistake again. From when I went to study abroad, to staying in hostels all along the Turkish coast with a group of friends, to moving overseas, notebooks retain the memories. They are kept in boxes and files and are some of my most valuable possessions. But how I so often wish I had that Snoopy notebook in my hand.

One Saturday afternoon, when I was eight years old, I asked my mother for a few sheets of paper and a pen. She tore out a few sheets from the memo pad she used to write casual letters, and grabbed a Bic from the cup attached to the wall near the kitchen phone.  I sat at the dining room table in our apartment, and wrote “First Time to Fly” in block letters. Then I underlined it, unsteadily but determinedly.

The story I composed was fictional,  but based almost exactly on my own first trip that involved an airplane – from New York to Orlando, to visit what was then called EPCOT Center, now just Epcot.

The park opened the year before, and as far as I was concerned, this was the most significant event the world had ever witnessed. I had gotten my hands on a book about new theme park, and I memorized it. The station that the kitchen radio was tuned to every morning ran a drawing for tickets to Epcot, and although we entered several times, we didn’t win.

At some point, Mom decided that we’d go anyway, just the two of us. We woke in the dark and caught a cab to La Guardia, and I danced down the aisle to our seats,  singing under my breath, “I’m riding on an airplane”,  stretching out “air” into four syllables.  Out the window, New York City was a-twinkle against that amber night sky.

And then there was Florida, with for-real palm trees, and ocean water that wasn’t bracingly cold, and pools that were warm even when they weren’t heated. And then there was Epcot Center, and the World Showcase, which had buildings for different countries, and we pretended we were actually traveling from country to country. That was the best time I’d ever had, even though one thing frightened me. There was still a Soviet Union and a Berlin Wall and China was still really Communist,  and inside China’s pavilion, there was a movie that showed the bicycle-clogged streets of Beijing, and everyone wearing drab khaki which seemed to blemd with smog. The colorlessness and the sameness repelled and fascinated. That’s what life is like when you’re not free, my mother said, in answer to my questions about why. That moment planted a seed of a lifetime’s interest in China, which first led me to select “Youth in Asia” as a topic for a Social Studies book report that year — the topic actually turned out to be “euthanasia” — but later more successfully shaped my reading and travels.

What I’ve just recounted are the moments from that trip that I find the most important now. But, as the title of my short story implies, what signified for my eight year old self was that first notch on my air transit belt. I attended the United Nations International School for early elementary school, and I was the only one in my class who had never been on an airplane, who had never left the country, in fact. This was only one of my differences with my fellow classmates, just one of the things that made me a mark. So my story focused on the flight.  My heroine was excited. “She was going to go on an airplane. If you went on one before, it wasn’t exciting. But this was her FIRST time. “People won’t stare at me when I say I never go on an airplane,” Ken sang happily. “Bye bye stares!”

I discovered this story tucked into a book several years ago, and every now and then I unfold the two yellowing pages and read them.  I think it’s funny that I gave my female protagonist a boy’s name — an homage to Nancy Drew’s best gal pal George. And I also find it a little sad. Out of all the wonderful experience on my first major journey, what inspired me to write was my delight at having gained a piece of social currency? It reminds me that I believed that amassing particular experiences, learning and saying the right combination of words,  would help make me invincible against teasing. It took me a long time to learn that that wasn’t how the game works — the most important thing is to appear unbothered by it. A handy fiction, but one I never quite learned to master.