Passion for Travel; TBEX Experience in Dublin

A Sense of Community

I love my family. They tell me they’re proud of me, they’re loving, they spoil me and above all they’re supportive of my endeavors in life. But they’re not travelers like me. They try to understand my passion for travel but are still regularly surprised when I tell them I’m off for yet another adventure. “You just returned!…You’re really going somewhere again?…Why so far away?…Don’t you want to stay home?”

Dublin, Ireland

Enter TBEX, “the world’s largest gathering of travel bloggers, writers, and new media content creators”. During the keynote speech on the morning of October 3rd, there were 500+ travelers in one room.  Travelers who all shared similar interests, who were explorers and writers and artists, and most importantly, fully understood the NEED TO TRAVEL.

Inspirational Sessions

I learned something from each session I attended, with topics that varied from lessons on social media to learning how to better work with tourism and travel companies and treat your blog like a business. The sessions that were most inspirational to me were:

21 Tools & Technology Tips To Dramatically Grow Your Following Online, presented by Ian Cleary

When I entered the stark conference room it was standing room only and the temperature in the room made me feel like I was inside a sauna. The session’s topic wasn’t exactly the most exciting topic in the world, and I expected a valuable (but boring) session. For the entire one hour presentation, I stood with iPad in hand, squeezed into a narrow space between the wall and the other (lucky, or maybe just smarter because they showed up early) seated attendees. It was 100% worth the sacrifice.

From the moment it started, Ian Cleary’s speech surprised me. His wit, humor & enthusiasm for the subject held my attention the entire way through. I couldn’t type fast enough. I picked up a lot of great tips to improve my blog and to begin to show it off more as a professional website, ideally helping me to get future freelance writing work.

The Quality Quotient: Ten Tips for Creating Content that Engages and Expands Your Audience, presented by Don George

Don George is an editor/writer for National Geographic, Lonely Planet, and Gadling. From the start, I loved his candid way of sharing his working routine and writing style with the conference attendees. Among his lessons were advice to the bloggers such as “Record dialogue. Include the taste, smell and sight of your experiences” and  “I just want to know the things about you that will help to describe the story…not your whole life story!”

Don George, Editor/Writer at National Geographic and Lonely Planet

In my future posts, I will routinely revisit my notes from Don’s presentation before I hit the publish button. After 25+ years in the business, Don is clearly still passionate about writing and I sympathized with many of the everyday trials he described that a writer goes through in developing a story.

More than ever, it proved to me that I was where I should be . After 10+ years stuck in the corporate world, Don’s speech reinforced to me that I was on the right path. The path to become a writer.

The Parties…

Travel inspiration and travel stories are one focus of my blog, but another of my regular writing topics focuses on beer and breweries. The TBEX opening party at the Guinness Storehouse was therefore a dream come true. The party went above and beyond my expectations.  It was the absolute perfect way to begin!

The next evening, the party was hosted by Expedia and held at the Odeon, a historical building in Dublin that was once an old railway station. The venue was spacious and elegantly laid out, with deep red curtains, a sleek bar layout and lots of cozy booths. It made me feel like I was back in era of the Roaring 20s. Below, characters dressed as the band U2 were among the party’s “guests”.

Hors d’oeuvres, complimentary cocktails, beer and wine flowed throughout the three hour event.  Another large station was set up where Irish brewers offered their beer (which unfortunately I didn’t discover until the latter half of the evening). I tasted some delicious beer from Blacks Brewery and Franciscan Well Brewery.

A Sense Of Community Develops Into Friendships

A sense of community is important, as the business of writing is often extremely lonely. You’re forced to sit by your computer for hours on end and isolate yourself from the rest of the world to write.

I met some wonderful friends at the conference who all understand what this process is like. Who regularly go through similar, difficult daily road blocks when it comes to sitting down and putting it all on paper (or computer, in this case!).

To all those friends who I’ve met over the course of the last week in Ireland : It’s been amazing. The experience wouldn’t have been the same without you. As travelers, I have a feeling we’ll definitely see each other again.

There’s only one major unknown: which city, country, or continent we’ll meet in along the way!