Welcome to a different kind of travel writing.
All About Imagery
Not every journey is worthy of a complete chronicling.
Even I don’t want to read a 3,000-word article about the shades of beige at Hilton Garden Inn in John’s Creek, GA.
Still, the wind snuck into the lobby whenever a guest walked in through the automatic doors, followed by autumn leaves like a parade of noisy ducklings. What to do with that imagery, or the memory of peeking through the plane window and seeing the blue vein of the river pulsing through the Sonoran desert?
As a poet, I’m compelled to translate moments into permanent mementos using the best words I know. Alas, poetic writing writhes particularly hard against SEO wrappers, so these passages will likely get lost amidst the listicles and shopping guides.
Oh well, at least you made it here. This travel journal is really what the Hotel Poet is all about: a hyper-observant focus on the curious sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings evoked by new environments that are accessed only by travel.
After all, isn’t a travel blog just a diary in the guise of advice articles?
The Travel Journal Format
Each entry in this travel journal is relatively short and extra pithy. This is a scrapbook of vignettes. How amazing that I can see something and post it here for the rest of the world to see in the exact same way!
This is what I love about writing: I can show how things really looked and get people to really look. And that’s why my content is always handcrafted and never AI scat: the machine never saw that something I saw. And what a something it was.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Anaïs Nin
My goal as a writer has always been to poeticize the prosaic — to see the world differently. Use this travel journal as a guide and as a lens in your own wanderings. And remember that writing is magic: with mere words, you can record and share your time here on planet earth.
