Randy Johnson thought the Internet would be ideal to show off the travel articles he had written in 20 years of roaming the world. A few had already appeared in print, but there were many many more.
Bill Dell savored the challenge of tying together hundreds of strands of diverse travel information in a Web site that he called “Dr. Memory’s Favorite Travel Pages.” He built it into an amazingly exhaustive directory with nearly 1,000 links to virtually every aspect of the travel business, including fine writing about personal experiences.
Dan K. Phillips set out to publicize his writing and the travel expertise of others. An electrical engineer with a master of divinity degree, he had traveled widely for the Southern Baptist Church and thought the Internet could provide the attention that publishers had denied him.
At the outset, all three were gung-ho. Johnson, 46, spent full time for two months setting up “Randy’s Travel Page” (http://ease.com/(tilde)randyj/travel.htm), with links to a variety of travel resources. Since early last summer, however, he has been so busy as a computer programmer for an Oregon software consulting company that he has lagged in keeping his site up to date. The site is rich in memories–of his high school adventure as an exchange student in Venezuela and six years on the road, including four in Japan.
Bill Dell, meanwhile, has long been a time-strapped executive of an environmental technology company whose recent move from Maryland to Arizona “took me out of the loop for a while.” He used to spend one to four hours a day on line for Dr. Memory, attempting to make order out of the Internet’s morass of travel information. At this writing, his site hadn’t been updated since last July 3, but he said he was collecting updates for a major reconstruction. You can reach the site at http://www.access.digex.net/(tilde)drmemory/cybertravel.html.
Dan Phillips keeps plugging from a base in Tennessee, hoping primarily that via his “Web Surfer Travel Journal” (http://edge.edge.net/(tilde)dphillip), his own travel writing will get wide attention. He says he updates the site once monthly, which takes two to three hours. “I used to do it more, but it was more than I could keep up with,” he said.
Besides promoting their own writing, developers of sites such as these load them with encyclopedic links that they hope will produce the ultimate travel resource. As long as he kept up to date, Dr. Memory was probably the most successful. It means keeping track of the rapidly growing number of travel-related Internet sites–those of airlines, hotels, tour companies, government tourist offices, etc.–a task in which a reliable directory can hardly afford to lag months behind.
In the early days, at least, the quest was abetted by a pioneer, now 37 years old, named Marcus L. Endicott. A peripatetic traveler and passionate environmentalist, he is an electronic bulletin-board maven–a master gatekeeper who stimulates, organizes and dispenses vast amounts of travel information. He presides over two Internet bulletin boards through which participants exchange information: one about environmental travel and the other about travel information technology. The technology board and Endicott’s now-out-of-date “Electronic Traveler” book showed many others how information could be compiled.
The easiest way to tune into his work is to get on his e-mail list, which is free. This can be done by e-mail to majordomo@igc.apc.org. In the body of the message, say “subscribe green-travel” if you want access to the ecological messages or “subscribe infotec-travel” if your interest is technology.
Endicott travels most of the time, nonetheless monitoring his boards diligently. He says he spends at least 20 hours a week on line. He writes books and freelance articles, makes speeches about ecological travel and consults, but says it’s hard to get by financially. “I’ve been in the red so long that I don’t know what black looks like,” he said.
A different sort of electronic pioneer is Paul Graveline, who in January 1990 started an electronic newsletter called the Caribbean Travel Roundup (http://shell4.ba.best.com/(tilde)ctr/ctrindx.htm), which he tries to issue every month. From a slim beginning, it has grown to maybe the equivalent of 100 pages a month, with some advertising support from the Caribbean travel industry. (For those who prefer to measure in cyberunits, the December 1996 issue ran 146,797 bytes.)
Graveline, 49 years old, teaches elementary school in Reading, Mass., a suburb of Boston. He says he started the roundup “just for the hell of it.” He publishes press releases and official announcements, such as a complete listing of the region’s new telephone area codes. He discusses the weather, environmental issues and economic news. But the heart and soul of the roundup are the observations, opinions and experiences of Caribbean travelers, who talk about sightseeing, water sports, restaurants, hotels, whatever.
“They can say whatever they want about a property,” Graveline said. “I don’t care about it. I can’t prove they’re accurate–it would take too much time to try.”
The roundup is distributed free. You can find it on the on-line services America Online (Trip Report Library) and CompuServe (Travel Forum). Some of the writing is primitive and the observations naive, but there are doses of informative reality:
“Fish dishes in Grenada are overcooked to a rubbery consistency 99.9 percent of the time,” wrote Don Golio (otherwise unidentified). “Even when asked to do otherwise, fish invariably come served this way.”
Occasionally an Internet surfer encounters both sophisticated writing and superb advice from a nonprofessional source who simply likes to share information. One such source is Edward J. Gehrlein, a retired airline executive from Kansas City, who has been to Europe nearly 90 times. His favorite haunts are Switzerland and Rome.
Gehrlein says his aim is to get people to travel more. He has a number of authoritative articles in the library of America Online’s “Independent Traveler” section. He suggests self-guided walks and offers a bounty of lodging, dining and transportation suggestions for Switzerland and Rome. All this information is free, except what it costs to connect to America Online.
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Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com
