Travel Blog

Big City Tavern on Las Olas last night was hosting a number of groups; we found the Penn alumni at the front end of the bar.

"Did you go to Penn?" an older man asked me.

"Villanova," I said. "But my brother went to Penn, my dad went to Penn Law School, and my wife who's over there went to Penn grad school." That seemed to satisfy him.

Still, I felt a little out of my league. Until people asked me what I did for a living.

"I'm a travel writer," I said, and that statement - in a room full of lawyers and financial advisers - got people's attention. They asked my favorite places, how I traveled, where I'd been recently, where I'd been published. "I have a piece," I said naturally, to the sound of an imaginary drum roll, "in the October Smithsonian." It almost made all the waiting to hear from editors - a fact of the travel writer life that never entered their fantasies - seem worthwhile.