California Road Trip

Posted by: Gary 10/10/2009

Over 7,000 miles later I am now on the California leg of my road trip.

The last week has been extreme busy. My days have consisted of long distance driving, meeting people and seeing things. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but I hasn’t left a lot of time for writing blog posts. I have an ever growing list of emails I have to respond to and an expanding number of photos I have to process.

To give you an idea of some of the great people I’ve been able to meet:

In Vancouver I had lunch with John Chow and got to talk about the business of blogging.
In Victoria I met Rob from Bloggeries.com who I’ve been talking to online for a long time. He is about to set off on his own trip around the world in the next month.
In Seattle I was able to meet a ton of travel bloggers: Pam Mandel from Nerds Eye View, Peter Carey from The Carey Adventures, Beth Whitman from Wanderlust and Lipstick, and Debbie Dubrow from Delicious Baby.
In Seattle I also snagged a last minute invite from the Hawaii Tourism Board who was putting on an evening for press/bloggers. There I was able to meet the Mayor of Honolulu, Mufi Hannemann.
In Portland I had lunch at a Greek Church picnic with Nick Maniatis who is about to set out on a trip around the world, and with Jessica Speigel from Boots N’ All.
I was convinced to stop in Petaluma, CA by Anastasia Schuster who gave me a grand tour of the town and also managed to get me a short meeting with one of the biggest names in podcasting, Leo Laporte, who was on his way to Dubai.
In San Francisco I met with PR/Marketing guru Renee Blodgett (who also travel blogs at We Blog The World). I also had lunch with my co-conspirator in the This Week in Travel Podcast, Chris Christensen, had drinks and sushi with Elliott Ng with Uptake.com, and a late dinner with my old friend Nate Dintenfass, and in the last hours before I left town I had morning coffee with Rehan Fernando from Phizuu who is working on an iPhone app(s) for me (hopefully more on that later).

Oh yeah, in between all of that I managed to actually get time to visit Olympic, Redwood and Yosemite National Parks.

My plan tomorrow is to drive from Bishop, CA (where I am now) and drive to Las Vegas by way of Death Valley to take some photos in the park, which I have never visited before. I’ll arrive in Vegas 5 days before the start of Blog World Expo, which will give me time to edit my photos, answer my emails, get some business cards made, and enjoy the $22/night room and the cheapo buffets all week long.

After Vegas I’ll be driving to LA to meet up with some more people and get a tour of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasedena! How awesome is that! (being a blogger has its advantages). From LA I’ll drive to Dallas by way of the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Carlsbad Caverns and maybe Zion or Arches in Utah. I’ll have about two weeks from the end of Blog World to get to Dallas before I have to catch a flight to Fort Lauderdale for a Twitter/blogger Princess Cruise.

If you are in the Vegas or Los Angles area and would like to meet up, please contact me. As you can see from the list above, I really do meet with people.

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