Jaunted

Now the time has come for me to move on once again, so I'd like to express my appreciation to those who made the experience such a pleasure. Thanks to Mark Johnson, who runs three of the best travel blogs out there - Jaunted, HotelChatter, and VegasChatter - and was good enough to let me write about pretty much any travel-related topic I found funny, interesting, or weird. Thanks to Paul Brady, my first editor, who patiently explained all the HTML coding that I never had to learn at my previous Movable Type-based blogs. (I can now throw down those tags and codes with my eyes closed, and that's a good skill to have.) Thanks to Juliana Shallcross, who has done an amazing job coordinating all three blogs, traveling the world, writing ten stories a day, and making it all look easy. Believe me, it's not.

Thanks to my wife, Jennifer, and our three-year-old son, Zachary, for letting me work (mostly) in peace on weekends.

Most of all, I'd like to thank the readers who cared enough to click on my stories and occasionally leave comments. I always appreciated the feedback, even when it pointed out that I was a knucklehead.

Here a few of my favorite stories from my tenure as Jaunted weekend editor: The 1982 World's Fair: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Again; 48 Hours in Washington, D.C.; Matt Comes Clean: He Was Faking It All Along (which irritated Dancing Matt to no end); What To Do if the Wine Cellar on Your Superyacht Does Not Suffice; Key West Spring Break; Does Anybody Else Remember The Old "If You Had Wings" Ride at Disney World?; and finally, Losing Time in Dublin.

In the meantime, I still have my day job at a major men's magazine and a number of side projects, but I'm always open to new ideas, so if anybody out there needs a sharp, tireless writer and editor with a keen grasp of the obvious, I'm in the book (both Facebook and phone book). And I still might contribute the odd story to Jaunted or HotelChatter, so maybe this isn't so much goodbye as au revoir. Enjoy your travels, everyone, and don't forget to tip your editors. Ciao for now.

[Photo: Victor Ozols]

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