October 2020 Blog Recap

Remember when I said that I’d probably be back to posting regularly on here by mid-September? I was dead-ass wrong.

Back in July, I decided to put in a bit of effort to make my website a bit less of a dumpster fire. It all started with deciding it would be a good idea to speed up my website (because I knew it was slow and sucked). I thought this was going to be a quick project, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I opened Pandora’s Box, you see.

So, guys, it turns out, I had ZERO idea what I was doing for the last five years from a tech standpoint. None. With the help of my friend Fabio Nodari, and about solid 12 weeks of work (sprinkled with days working my actual day job, and an adventure hither thither), I’m finally almost finished. Saying I learned a lot over the course of this all is an understatement.

However, I tried to keep my site looking as close to what it did as before, so you may not have noticed that anything had changed at all. There’s nothing I hate more than when I return to a website and I can’t find anything because it has drastically changed.

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…But in other, more exciting news

Since I returned home from Yemen and Egypt right at the beginning of March I’ve been helping Hilary Bradt and Janice Booth, and their entire amazing team at Bradt Guides on the first edition of the Socotra Guidebook. You can find some of my photos and a few written contributions in there. Additionally, you can find some of my photos in Bradt’s third edition of their Tajikistan Guidebook that is set to release December 1st. As part of the promotion for the new Socotra book, I’ve contributed a few articles on the Bradt website, including a photo essay on Socotra, a feature as one of Bradt’s Photographers of the Month, and I’ll have an interview in their upcoming Travel Club Magazine due out in November.

I also wrote a piece on Tajikistan for WideOyster Magazine’s upcoming edition hashing out some of my favorite things about the country. You can expect to see it sometime next month.

My version of my Southern Italy road trip itinerary was featured in the article Best Italian Road Trips: 12 Super Dreamy Routes over on My Path in the World.

What I published

Welp guys, this one is short and sweet seeing that I just finally cleaned up the website debacle and have finally moved back into writing again. Truth be told, the two blog posts from Central Asia had been sitting in my drafts half-written for an eternity, and the two Alaska posts were partially written on the notes in my phone from some of my domestic adventures here this summer.

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New trips on the horizon

I haven’t left Alaska in nearly 8 months now. Everyone assumes that I’m about to crawl out of my skin at this point, but to be quite honest it’s been kind of nice to be here and get work done without the constant lure to take off somewhere or lead a trip elsewhere. But that doesn’t stop you from making plans now, does it?

2021 (Covid willing) will be a crazy year in terms of organized trips and expeditions I’ll be co-leading. I had announced earlier this year the new itineraries we were planning for Yemen, Socotra, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan, Alaska, Tajikistan, the Afghan Wakhan, and Uzbekistan… but now I’m adding one more to the list. This one will be to the North Caucus regions of Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria with Soviet Tours, taking place in the early summer of 2021. You can expect more details coming soon (in the form of a blog post). However, if you are interested, you can enter your email below to join the update list and I’ll send you a message as I lock in more details.

Of course, these trips are all a bit up in the air, dependent on what next year looks like in terms of travel and what countries will be opening to which nationalities and so forth.

What’s to come in November?

I’m hoping to get a bunch more blog posts out (I have over 100 posts on my to-do list, several of which are already partially written). I have no shortage of ideas, just a lack of time to put it all together. I am a bit burnt out after dealing with the whole website nightmare, so you can probably expect a bit of a lag between articles for a bit of time here.

Well, that’s all I have time to write this month. I’ll try to get one of these out at the end of November, but no promises…