My friends think I have the perfect dream job. They don’t understand how much work goes into all of it. I’d like to say I make middle-class income from it, but I am not there yet! I will say though, that I never really thought of reaching out to publications!

My newest guidebook Hiking the Parks: Redwood National and State Parks comes out in spring of 2019. The parks themselves don’t allow dogs on trails, but dogs can go on a few city beaches, and on Smith River National Recreation Area trails outside of Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.

I agree. Travel writing doesn’t pay the bills. Plus there’s a bazillion bloggers who write about every place in the world, it’s getting harder to find travel markets.

Tom, thanks for sharing your experience. The cost of the travel itself is a major headwind to making it as a travel writer. When I’m researching my Northern California hiking guidebooks, I almost always am able to sleep for free in the forest somewhere, and I can buy and prepare my own food and keep it in the ice chest. By contrast, staying in hotels and eating in restaurants adds up quickly.

I have been able to go to some interesting places on fully compensated press trips (Myanmar, Stuttgart, many places in the US), but most major publications don’t accept pieces from comped trips, so the writing work for those has been unpaid, and relegated mostly to online publications. And that speaks to a travel writer’s trouble too: the sheer expense of travel, and often when it’s backed by a PR firm or the like, the writer can’t get published in a big venue.

However, it’s still fun and interesting to write travel stories; I just wrote one for a local publication—the San Jose Mercury News—about a local place to hike (Nisene Marks) and eat afterward. No exotic travel there, but a good time anyway.