Missing the Meeting But Ready for Bulgaria

The roller coaster that is life goes up, up, up, then plunges down. I had been lamenting a downturn in the trips that I’ve been accustomed to taking nearly every month….partly because I needed to hunker down and take care of business.  Perhaps part of the problem is Facebook. Reading about so many of my travel writer friends’ great trips all over the world was bumming me out. We writers have this problem, we get jealous when the other guys seem to be going to better places than us.

This morning many of these travel peers are meeting in New York City with many European tourism boards, and since there weren’t enough of the boards to match up to a reasonable amount of journalists, many of us were cut from the invite list. Ouch! But it all came back to being A-OK yesterday when I checked my work email and got an invitation from the Republic of Bulgaria to come on a press trip in November.  Right on!

A travel writer loves nothing more than to be invited to a new country—a place he’s never seen, a culture he’s never explored. What I know of Bulgaria is that its capital is Sofia and that the tomatoes are some of the world’s best. Oh, and it’s located above Greece right next to Macedonia, and many of the citizens are dirt poor.

I am leaving any worries about what I’m missing in NYC behind, anticipating instead another trip, another chance to post daily blogs from a foreign place. Today I turned 54 and travel invitations are  the best way for me to celebrate a birthday.