This weekend I was at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The venue was host to the biggest motorsport property in the UK, the British Superbikes (BSB). The event was different, because as well as being supported by other motorbike classes, BSB hosted the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB, a new one-make car series. It could have all [...]
Upon return to Australia in late 2001, I moved to Wamberal, a small beach side tourist town north of Sydney. The plan was to focus on travel writing and photography, something that I had grown to enjoy. I rented a room overlooking the surf and completed a Diploma in Travel Writing and Photography from the Australian College of Journalism.
In early 2002, I bought a round the world ticket with the following stops pencilled in. Vancouver, Seattle, New York, London, Delhi, Bangkok, Melbourne. In March 2002, I flew to Vancouver, equipped with a new laptop, new SLR camera, video camera and freshly printed business cards – Travel Writer and Photographer.
From Vancouver, I travelled down to Seattle, then down to Oregon. Seattle provided one of my first published pieces of travel writing – Beasts, Beans and Bolsheviks.
One of the reasons I had chosen to visit New York, apart from visiting Bolt.com colleagues after 9/11, was to attend a large writers festival organised by the American Association of Writers. After that, it was back to London.
When I had left London in 2001, it had been with a certain sense that the city and I had unfinished business. Returning in April 2002, I felt a real sense of having to prove something. My idea, was to create a social network (although the term had barely been coined) bringing together travellers, allowing them to share stories online as well as at events. That idea became ‘Itchy Feet’.
The first Itchy Feet event was attended by eight people, who ended up getting almost a one-on-one audience with travel writer Peter Moore, author of such books as ‘The Wrong Way Home’. Subsequent events attracted 80-100 people, all paying to listen to speakers such as Paul Goldstein, Photographer and Guide. The website featured a busy forum for travellers to ask questions and share ideas, and the e-zine was a great way for me to showcase my own travel writing and photography.
Unfortunately, the travel market post 9/11 was struggling and Itchy Feet never really got the momentum it required. It did however, teach me a lot about creating communities and using the web to bring them together. While trying to find cheap public wi-fi to write stories, I had the idea for Hotspotted.
