Capri's Song of the Sea at a Bygone Beach Club
Welcome to the March edition of Perceptive Travel, the online magazine featuring voyager tales from wandering book authors.
After 18 years of publishing, we're slowing down the pace a bit in 2024 and sometimes highlighting some previous stories from the archives that we'd like to bring into the light again. Perceptive Travel is not a news site, after all. We publish narrative stories from book authors, so most of what we put up isn't all that timely.
Most of our narrative travel tales are evergreen, but this month we've got plenty of reasons to celebrate: we won a bunch new awards to add to our bulging virtual trophy case. On the last day of February, the North American Travel Journalists Association announced their "Best Travel Writing Awards" winners. Then the next day, the Best Travel Writing winners list for the Solas Awards run by Travelers Tales' Publishing came out. The five stories below were winners in one of the two and in the first one listed, scored in both.
"Trying to Feel at Home in a Grand Castle in Ireland" by Gillian Kendall
"Skiing on the Surface of the North Idaho Panhandle" by Tim Leffel
"A Modern Story from Old Africa" by James Dorsey
"Island Hopping in Greece on a Small Yacht Cruise" by Tim Leffel
"Capri's Song of the Sea at a Bygone Beach Club" by Susan Van Allen
We're especially proud of all our Solas winners over the years because unlike how its done with most of these contests, for that one you only submit a Word doc. The writing has to stand well on its own, without the judges' biases giving it extra weight because it came from a long-running magazine brand name they know well.
Also, what is March known for? St. Patrick's Day, right? You can find quite a few stories from Ireland in our Europe travel story archives, then there's a lot more about Ireland on the blog. Pour a Guinness and check them out.
Most months we give away some new travel gear item, the prize going to one of the people who enters from our e-mail newsletter list or our Facebook page. We'll take a break on the contest this month and resume it again in April. Meanwhile, congrats to subscriber Susan B. of California who won the high-capacity portable charger from POWERADD.
All she had to do was reply back to the newsletter with the requested info or watch our Facebook page for entry instructions. This is no lottery—odds are so good that more than a few of our readers have won twice! We'll be back with a new prize next month, so click that link and get on our list if you're not on it already.
Looking for some more great travel stories? Dive into the Perceptive Travel story archives, where you can find hundreds of travel stories from around the globe, everything that has appeared here since our debut in the mid-'00s. In between new online magazine issues, check out the award-winning Perceptive Travel Blog for shorter takes on weird and wonderful places around the world.
Thanks for reading our online travel magazine,
- Tim Leffel, Editor