Travel Blog

This week I've been wishing I were an editor again.

In my travel writing group, Roland wrote a charming story about traveling around India, a large part of which featured the sanguine sexagenarian perched on his top bunk on a train and feeling blissfully at one with the world.

Then my friend (and former freelancer) Ericka sent me a story about looking for love - and failing to find it - in Fiji. "I have a thing for men in skirts," it began, before telling in equally arresting prose of her fruitless search for a local dancer she'd met at a travel trade show in Manhattan.

In a way, the stories were opposites - one about the joys, the other about the sorrows of travel. But they both looked at the essence rather than the practicalities of the activity. They were the kinds of stories I used to love to publish, and now there are very few places for them. Today newspaper travel sections, and the glossy travel magazines, ignore the humorous and the atmospheric in their obsession with tips and information. Their purpose is to help people when they get there, but they don't inspire anyone to go.