You know that yucky sluggish feeling, often on Monday mornings, when you’ve spent a couple of days eating too much, not getting any exercise, and you feel like Jabba the Hut?  It’s common in most humans around the holidays or after Super Bowl weekend.

   It’s also a common condition for travel writers any time the year.  Much of our responsibilities in exploring new communities and unusual cultures is to report on the food.  That means we have to eat it.  Yeah, tough job, I know, but have you really looked at some of the things the rest of the world eats? 

  In addition to a comfortable pair of walking shoes and clean underwear, a savvy travel writer always packs Tums, Imodium, Pepto, Beano and an entire medicine cabinet in their carry-on. And for some countries, a prescription for Cypro is a necessity.

   Fortunately, or not, my gastrointestinal hang-over this Monday morning is not from eating toasted crickets in a far off land, nibbling at street markets in a third-world nation or imbibing in drink that should not have been drunk.

    My husband and I have the honor of being parents to an only child, a fabulously charming young man to whom we’ve attempted to show the world as he has grown up.

  We also have the honor of being aunt and uncle to three equally charming nephews who are among our favorite creatures to harass, tease and in general give a hard time to.

   So over the years, we’ve invited said nephews to travel with us on vacations and some work-related trips as age appropriate companions to our son. The first destination was Disney World, followed by a few trips to Colorado and horseback riding for a week in the Kansas Flint Hills.  Then there was the trip to Boston, which has since become known in our family circle as Aunt Diana’s Bataan Death March to Every Historic Site on the East Coast.

   But we’ve had fun, and hope the nephews have had as well. 

 Except poor Aaron.  Aaron is the baby of the family and a real cutie (he looks like his Aunt Diana).  But by the simple fate of birth order, logistics and other factors out of everyone’s control, it’s always been one of Aaron’s older brothers to hop in a mini-van or on an airplane with his cousin, aunt and uncle.

   Once as we were loading the vehicle with one of his big brothers and the many accoutrements of a teenage boy, Aaron stood off to the side with a forlorn look on his face. Realizing how he must have felt, I gave him a big hug, promising him that the very next trip was his. 

   “Anywhere you wanna go, that’s where we’ll go,” I said, fully expecting him to ask for Disney World or some place with a beach, or an otherwise typical destination for an eight-year-old boy.

   As we continued the loading process, Aaron was very quiet.  Finally, as we were saying our good-byes, Aaron had made his decision, announcing in very certain terms his preferred destination.

   “Aunt Diana, I’ve heard about that big wall they have over there in China, and I’d really like to see that some day.”

   We were flabbergasted that he had even heard of the Great Wall, but we promised to do our best.

   Well, now the Beijing Olympics are underway.  Little Aaron is going to be 16 in a few days, and he was really counting on Uncle Bruce, who does a lot of sports photography, to get him to China to see that big wall for his birthday.

    That hasn’t worked out, nor has a trip Aunt Diana was planning to China in ’09.  But we’re not forgetting our promise to our nephew, nor our own desire to see that Great Wall, the Forbidden City and all of the exotic mysteries of China.

   In the meantime, perhaps Aaron and others who have a desire to learn about China can read a story I have in this week’s Kansas City Star.  It’s a virtual story, for virtual travelers, complete with virtual souvenirs, post cards and the works.

   And next week I’ll have another story in the Star that I was able to research and write on line.  It’s about sites that were built for the Olympics but will be there long afterwards the games are over – sites that travelers to the great city in the future will not want to miss.   

That’s you and me, Aaron baby!  You, me and that big wall over there.  Keep your passport ready.  I haven’t forgotten, I promise.

  My friend Amy spent this weekend shopping for a new motorcycle.  I haven’t yet heard the results of her individual effort to boost the U.S. economy, but she signed off cyberspace on Friday afternoon like Fred Flintstone sliding down a dinosaur tail when the 5 o’clock whistle blows at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company.

yabba-dabba-doo!

   Otherwise a soft spoken, petite woman and mother of two at an age I shouldn’t mention for fear of retribution, Amy is not your stereotypical biker chick.

   Then there’s our friend Larry – a worthless creature six days out of seven who tells us he is gainfully employed, although we’ve never seen any real proof.  So when he roars into our driveway on his Harley wearing leather chaps and a do-rag, all possibility of virtue goes out the door.

   Maybe I got all of that stuff out of my system as a teenager, roaring around the back roads of southern Illinois on a Kawaski 175 in an attempt to appear as cool as the Easy Rider.  Of course, a six-inch gash on my right knee that still oozes gravel chips 30 years later, obtained from losing control of said Kawaski, certainly contributed to getting the motorcycle bug out of my system.

   But Larry and Amy are not alone in their adult obsession with big toys that make a lot of noise.  If they didn’t have responsibilities that require them to behave like adults this week, they would be on the road to Sturgis South Dakota…

…and oh, Bob McClintick, we know you would be leading the pack on your new toy, leaving Lisa and those three kids behind like dust in the wind.

   A tiny little town in the Black Hills with just about 5,000 residents, Sturgis is making a lot of noise this week.  It’s the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and Black Hills Motor Classic, and with 600,000 bikers, yes, it’s a noisy place.

   But when Bruce and I visited in May, it was so quiet you could hear the birds chirp and the flags snap in the breeze.  That’s one of the many things we love about the Black Hills, and it’s my lead in a brief story that appears today in the Dallas Morning News. 

    It was one of those days that makes you want to apply for a job making burgers at McDonald’s.  I arrived at Kansas City International Airport about 90 minutes before my flight to Washington, DC, boarded in a timely manner, sat on the tarmac for about 90 minutes, only to learn that the flight had been canceled due to mechanical failure.

   And not just my flight, but about four others by the same airline within just a few minutes.  I could say which airline, but that would just be me being snarky.  It really could have been any out there in the skies, but why does it always happen every time I fly THIS particular airline?

    The line of hot, frustrated passengers snaked through Terminal A and the low battery signal began beeping on my cell phone while I tried to call those who had coordinated this research trip to Prince William County Virginia.

   So I spent almost an hour sitting on the floor near the women’s restroom with my cell phone plugged into the rare free outlet, trying to make alternate arrangements.

   That’s not just the life of a travel writer, but many business and leisure travelers these days.  It’s happening more and more often, and the frustration is growing with everyone.

   Except for one guy.  One guy in a business suit standing in line and talking to no one in particular.  As others tried to calm crying babies, call waiting family members, rearrange business plans, and simply cope, this guy spoke loud enough to be heard over all of the commotion about the need to “roll with the flow.”

   “If you travel as much as I do, you learn to roll with the flow.”  “There’s nothing you can do about it, just roll with the flow.”  “Just roll with the flow is my advice for these situations.”

   I wanted to roll him with the flow all right, right into the flow of on-coming traffic on I-29. Right into the flow of the Missouri River with concrete blocks tied to his tongue.

    Eventually, I was rebooked on another flight, went through security again, only to have my toothpaste confiscated, the same toothpaste that had safely made it past the scrutiny of TSA just a few hours earlier.  And my earrings that had beeped in the morning were no longer considered a national security threat.

    Now waiting at my new gate, I fired up my laptop to get some work done, only to learn that the wireless service in Terminal A at KCI was not working this day.   Fortunately, Mr. Roll-With-the-Flow had been rebooked on my flight and was now seated close enough to me so that I could continue to benefit from his free and unsolicited “roll with the flow” advice.

   Then came the announcement that really made my day – my flight was canceled again, this time due to weather conditions.

   So I gathered up everything, took the bus back to long term parking to my car that had now been basking in the 100 degree Kansas City heat all day and exited the airport, only to be charged the full 24-hour rate for the eight hours of pleasure I had just enjoyed.

    As I expressed my deepest satisfication with this situation, the young woman in the toll booth looked at me wistfully. 

   “You know, I’ve never been on an airplane.  I’ve never even been in one of the terminals over there,” she said.  “I sit here every day taking money and hearing people complain, but I would really just like to be able to go somewhere, anywhere.”

   That shut me up all right.

   Once again, I look at what I do for a living and thank my lucky stars, the Good Lord Above, and the winning lottery ticket that came with my education and gifts to be able to write, travel, and explore the world while getting paid for it.  Every job, every career, every life has its frustrations and disappointments, and freelance travel journalism is no different.

   But at least I’m not in a little booth all by myself making minimum wage for taking money from disgruntled travelers.  I smiled at her and expressed my support for her dreams to come true.

  I drove away knowing that I would be glad do it all again any day for the opportunity to see some of what that young woman and so many others can only dream of.  Then the song from the old TV show “Rawhide” popped into my head, you know the one the Blues Brothers made famous…

“Rollin’, rollin’ rolling’

Keep them doggies rollin’ Rawhide!

Through wind and rain and weather….”

   My issue is the lead, or in some journalistic circles, the lede.  That’s the beginning of the story, the first couple of sentences that sets the stage for all to come, that draws the reader in and helps them commit emotionally to the next several minutes, hours or however long it takes to read your prose.

  When I get the lead right, the rest of the story just flows.  Most of the time, I write the leads in my head, over and over, trying on a dozen different approaches to the story, so when I finally sit in front of keyboard, it just happens. Of course, I may still struggle over a number of points in the developing text, the pacing or rhythm of the story, and certainly a dramatic conclusion.

   But getting the beginning right is important.

   Today, talking about leads is my metaphor for something bigger, yet equally challenging and significant in my life, in anyone’s life, whether or not they write for a living.  Twenty-five years ago this week, I committed to something big, something that has shaped the rest of my story.

    On a really hot day in Cape Girardeau Missouri with only one air conditioning unit working at the Centenary United Methodist Church and with about 150 of our family and friends with us, Bruce and I were married.

    That was the beginning of this story, the beginning of a dream to write and photograph as a team, to travel the world and explore.  There have been plenty of struggles in getting this story right, and it’s certainly not near it’s conclusion, but we keep working on that one every day we’re together.

…And they all lived happily ever after.

    Watching the promos for most of the movies coming out this summer leads me to one very depressing conclusion: I am no longer the demographic age for which Hollywood is making its movies.

    Of course, even when I was the target of movie marketing executives, I didn’t pay to see that many movies in the theaters. I’m cheap enough that I waited until they came out on tape or DVD.  But still, to realize that Hollywood is no longer trying to lure me to their big screens, well, that’s just depressing.

   Nonetheless, in my work as a travel writer, I find that now and then I need to go the movies.  When I was writing about some of the Jesse James sites in northwest Missouri, I needed to see the Brad Pitt movie “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

    After we climbed to the top of Mount Rushmore, I rented “National Treasure II:  The Book of Secrets.”  Do you know there’s not really a lake on top of Mount Rushmore? That’ll be in my story.

   And when I was in Hawaii at Turtle Bay Resort, I witnessed the filming of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” so seeing that in order to be prepared to write about it made obvious sense as well.

   Well, now there’s another movie to be released in August that will cause me to fork over $8 for a movie ticket and twice that much for popcorn and a Dr. Pepper, all in the name of research.  It’s a Woody Allen flick starring Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson called “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and guess where it was shot?

   If you guessed Barcelona, and if you can locate Spain on a globe, then you’re brighter and better educated than most of the masses for which the movies are now being made.

   I just hope I can get a senior citizen discount when I buy my ticket.  That’ll show Hollywood!!!   

   I first started thinking about doing a blog about my travels and writing last October at a conference of the Society of American Travel Writers in Manchester, England.  Shel Holtz, a communication and technology consultant who wrote the book “Blogging For Business,” led one of the professional development sessions.

   Now it’s fair to say, and I don’t think Mr. Holtz would disagree, that he is a man who has drunk the Kool-Aid. He’s taken the bait.  He’s gone over to the Dark Side.

   Holtz is a fanatic for the power of and potential for blogging.  My notes from the session say that he reads something like 600 blogs a day.  Now I don’t know if that is humanly possible, but hopefully mine is one of them.  I’m just glad that it’s one of yours.

    Anyway, all of his comments were bouncing around in my head the next day as a group of us writers spent the day exploring in nearby Liverpool.  All of the blogging dialogue on one side of my brain became entwined with “the merseybeat,” that fabulous rhythm brought to the world by John, Paul, George and Ringo….and I decided that the name of my blog would be “Ticket to Write.”

   Get it?

  “She’s got a ticket to wri-i-i-te…”

    If I had paid closer attention to Mr. Holtz, I might have learned how to insert sound here, so you’ll just have to hum along.  As it turns out, “I think I’m gonna be sad…” because someone else already had snagged the domain for “Tickettowrite.com.”  So instead, the cyber world gets Diana’s Destinations - maybe somebody will write a song by that title … ya think?

    However, all was not lost from my visit to Liverpool.  It was John Lennon’s 67^th birthday that day, and thus the lead to a story that runs in the July issue of a fabulous new publication called Kansas City Urban Times.  This month marks the one year anniversary of Urban Times, so if you’re in town, pick up a free copy at any of the stands around downtown or stop by the office at 1819 Wyandotte and join me, John, Paul, George and Ringo in singing…

You say it’s your birthday
It’s my birthday too–yeah
They say it’s your birthday
We’re gonna have a good time
I’m glad it’s your birthday
Happy birthday to you!

     “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch…. I fear this disease is incurable.”

   That is the opening line of John Steinbeck’s novel “Travels with Charley” and in short, it sums in brief prose my very experiences of life.

   The novel is a light-hearted review of a road trip Steinbeck took late in his life with his dog Charley.  They cris-cross the country “in search of America” and in so doing, encounter an intriguing collection of human beings and situations that make the back roads of this country so, well, intriguing.

   Steinbeck soon learned that having his dog Charley with him opened many conversations, set strangers at ease and overall led to greater adventures. Not only was he a good companion, he served a purpose and made the journey so much more pleasurable in many ways.

   However, I’m a cat person and little Miss Snowbelle, who becomes perturbed during the three block ride to the veterinarian’s office, would never tolerate the discomforts and inconveniences of three month a cross-country road trip..

   Thank goodness I have my friend Edna.  She lives around the corner and would hop in the car with me at a moment’s notice, so ready is she to explore the world – or just escape her husband, kids and dogs that live in their house.

   Our schedules are such that we usually have our Christmas lunches in February, so getting together for a road trip is about as likely as the price of gasoline dropping to less than the gross national product of a small nation.

   However, the moon and stars aligned very briefly on a sunny spring day a few weeks back, and Edna and I took off down I-70.  Blackwater, Missouri was the destination, a fun little dot in the road about half-way between Kansas City and Columbia.  The resulting story is in the summer issue of Show-Me Missouri Magazine.

   This isn’t the first time Edna and I have explored the back roads of Missouri together, and each time, she has been a pleasant traveling companion who made my work easier.  Just like Steinbeck’s Charley, Edna opens many conversations, sets strangers at ease and contributes to a great adventure.  

    And now that I’ve compared her to a poodle named Charley for all of cyberspace to enjoy for eternity, we’ll see how long it will be, if ever, before I write the next installment of “Travels with Edna.”

Luv ya girlfriend!

   My Grandma Eastman lived in little Anna, Illinois, one of those places where still today many people don’t bother to lock their doors.  And certainly 40 years ago, there were fewer reasons to worry about whether that dead bolt and chain were in their places.

   So when we would come to visit, we often just opened the front door and walked in, calling to Grandma as we went.  Sometimes she was in the kitchen or in the basement doing laundry, but most often, she was out back in her little garden where she celebrated the better part of many of her days.

   Wherever she was, when she heard us calling, she would respond “Toot, toot.”  And she would keep repeating it as she got nearer, just like a little train announcing its arrival.

    Well, it’s not just little grandmothers and choo-choo trains that go “toot, toot.”  In a recent professional development session at a writer’s conference I attended, Susan Kraus, a writer from Lawrence, Kansas, chastised and challenged all of us to toot our own horns more often.

   Well here I go.

   At the writer’s conference I was at in Rapid City, I won a third place award in magazine writing for an article I did for Points North Magazine from our trip to Alaska.  The name of the story was “The Great Silent Places” and it’s on my website.

   I didn’t go to the spring meeting of the Midwest Travel Writers Association that was held in Amarillo, Texas.  Nothing against Amarillo – I understand they have an abundance of Dr. Pepper in Amarillo.  It’s just that I’ve been traveling quite a bit and every writer has to spend some serious butt time in front of the computer or it’s not called work and nobody writes you a paycheck.

   The spring meeting is when MTWA, the oldest professional travel writers’ organization in the country, recognizes outstanding achievement among its members.  The awards are called Mark Twain awards, after one of the world’s first and best travel writers, who, of course, was from right here in Missouri.

    Well,  I’m just a little embarrassed to tell you the details, but in summary…

… you’re reading a blog from the Mark Twain Travel Writer of the Year.

toot, toot.  

    The most exciting part of my work, some might call it glamorous, is exploring and writing about far away places, exotic cultures and experiences that some might call adventures.  But a real pleasure for me is finding a great story and exciting destination in my own back yard.

   That was the case in January when I had the opportunity to return to Cape Girardeau, Missouri – not exactly my birthplace, but certainly where I spent a lot of time as a child.  It was when I started college at Southeast Missouri State that I really came to love Cape. (I would insert some stories of my college experiences here, but since my parents read this blog, perhaps those stories would be left to the imagination of those who “enjoyed” college as I did).

    My first professional jobs were in radio and television Cape Girardeau, and of course, that showed me the little community in an entirely different perspective.

   But going back to my roots 30 years later was not the experience that Thomas Wolfe had when he wrote his infamously quoted novel “You Can’t Go Home Again.”  I fell in love with Cape again, with the majesty of the Mississippi River there, the history of Lewis & Clark, the Trail of Tears, of Mark Twain.

    The results of my visit fill pages 56-59 in the June issue of The Crafts Report.  And by golly, if you flip on to the next page, you’ll see a story about a craft artisan from North Dakota who taught Martha Stewart a thing or two.

    I’ve had a relationship with the editors at The Crafts Report for nearly 20 years, which is longer than many friendships, marriages and prison sentences.

   Like Martha, I got to go home again, but my visit didn’t require an ankle bracelet.