Archive for June, 2008
Facebook Fran
Jun 30th
If you read the blog comments, many of you want to know more about the people behind Global Traveler. Karen S. specifically wants to know about me, so I thought, a good way to accomplish this would be to put together a Facebook page. So, that is what I have done! It is a work in progress and I plan to take more pictures when I travel the world and add these to the collections.
So, please enjoy and use this to learn more about me if you interested! But, of course, you will have to be my friend to see the pictures and read my Facebook page.
I encourage the readers of this blog to join and create a community!
Cheers!
-Fran Gallagher, publisher and CEO
Remembrance of Things Past
Jun 29th
Anniversaries and birthdays tend to make one look back, and what I’ve been looking back on the last few days is Portugal.
The reminiscence was triggered by Ron Bernthal‘s review in the June 25 eFlyer of the Terreiro do Paco restaurant in Lisbon. I haven’t been to the restaurant, but I’ve been to the square. While I’ve been to the city many times, I remember my first visit well – it was my very first press ‘junket.’
I’d been to Europe before, and I’d been on press trips before, but they’d all been individual. This was the first time I’d gotten to mix with other travel journalists, and I believe I was the youngest person on the trip. I remember being grateful that I’d traveled a bit in the previous year so that I didn’t feel like a total neophyte. There were also some editors who didn’t travel as much as the freelance writers, so I wasn’t the only person who hadn’t been to Lisbon before.
Anyway, I still love Lisbon to this day. I remember how beautiful the Jeronimos Monastery was (is), how impressed I was with the Explorers monument, walking the cobbled streets of the Alfama. Odd things stick in my mind, like what I was wearing the first day, and having a chicken cross my path in the Alfama.
I also remember that it was my first experience of being flirted with by married men, that there were couples who traveled together and I wondered if they both really worked or if it was a dodge, and thinking that a few of the women were ‘old’ – at the same time being glad that it looked like a career that wasn’t age-dependent.
That was 30 years ago, so I guess that means I’m living proof that my last observation was correct!
- Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer
Birthday Greetings II
Jun 28th
This week marks the anniversary of Global Traveler’s blog, and this weekend marks the anniversary of my first blog here. Last year, my first blog was on my birthday, though thanks to leap year, my birthday isn’t til Monday this year.
Looking back over the last year, of course it’s the travels that stand out. In the last year I’ve been to Colorado, New York, England and Israel, and I’m off to Poland Wednesday. I’ve also had the privilege of virtually traveling to the wide range of locations visited by those who write reviews for eFlyer (a special hat tip to Ron Bernthal).
On a more parochial level, I moved again this week, just about a mile. Packing and unpacking is a good time to revisit memorabilia. My favorite from my travels is a little trophy I got from the Harbor Bay Yacht Club in Cape Town, basically for being a good sport; we never did catch any fish that day, but they said I was the first American–not just American woman, mind you, but American–who hadn’t begged to turn around after tackling the surf in the ski boats they use for fishing off the shallow shelf of the Cape. It’s just a little plastic thing, but it’s engraved with my name, and it reminds me of being young and intrepid and being in Africa for the first time.
- Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer
Caviar and Squirrels
Jun 26th
Happy Birthday, GT blogs! I’m happy to have graduated from a “guest blogger†to a Thursday blogger.
Monday night, Alexandra and I made an appearance at the hotel launch party for the SLS Hotel that is scheduled to open in
- Courtney Centeno, account executive
