Dug this photo out of my scanned image archives and couldn’t help but smile.  Here’s my sister Susan (with the hood on) and Sally (with the hood off) on the Cave of the Winds tour at Niagara Falls, a memory from road-tripping across Ontario with them in the early 90s.

On that journey, we discovered the Three Sisters Islands on the American side of the falls.  Exploration ensued, as it would for the rest of our immersion into the outdoors of Ontario, all the way north to the Bruce Peninsula, with stops to hike the Elora Gorge and along the Mad River Gorge in Collingwood on what turned out to be a national holiday for hiking. Everywhere we turned, fall color painted the Niagara Escarpment as we followed it from the Niagara River to Lake Huron.  It was the first I’d heard or learned of the Bruce Trail, a long distance trail I long to do someday.

Three Sisters is a book, a memoir, I’ve had in my heart for more than a decade, since we lost our dear sister Sue to cancer.  I’m finally ready to write it now.

“Six years ago, I started sharing my knowledge of Florida’s outdoors online,” said Friend, “creating a blog that documented places I was hiking for guidebook research. Since then, finding, exploring, and sharing new hiking trails has become an integral part of my life.”

Friend launched the new FloridaHikes.com on November 30. Visual and map-based navigation make it easy to find trails that fit your personal interest. Extensive details – including step-by-step narratives, special instructions for hikers, maps, and mileage charts – are a key part of the website.

“The Florida Hikes website keeps getting better and better!,” said Kevin Mims, VISIT FLORIDA Outdoors & Nature Insider. “You won’t find a more comprehensive place for Florida hiking information, and I love how easy it is to find trails of every type.”

Visitors to the website can subscribe to the Hike-A-Week, a weekly column providing a detailed hike writeup via email, and the Florida Hikes eNews, a Friday recap of content additions to the site and trail-related events around Florida.

“I want to give everyone in Florida the tools to live a healthier life by just stepping outdoors and taking a hike,” said Friend. “Especially in our current economy, hiking is the least expensive way to bond with your family, clear your head, and keep yourself heart-healthy.”

The award-winning author of 25 books – including ten books on hiking in Florida, with another one on the way from Menasha Ridge Press – Friend is the chair of the Society of American Travel Writers Freelance Council, a member of the Florida Outdoor Writers Association, and sits on the Board of Directors of Friends of Florida State Parks. She lives in Sanford.

For more information, visit www.floridahikes.com

As part of the 28th Annual New Year’s Eve Campout at Doe Lake, Ocala National Forest – an annual event for Florida Trail members, hosted by Lou and Rachael Augspurg of the Central Florida Chapter- I’ll be sharing my travels on foot through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Areas I’ll show and talk about with you during the evening program include:

• Isle Royale National Park, one of America’s least-visited national parks due to its remoteness but a mecca for backpacking;
• Grand Island National Recreation Area, an island offshore from Munising with excellent backpacking to secluded beaches and beauty spots;
• Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, where I’ve been taking on the “Pictured Rocks Challenge” of completing all 65+ miles of hiking in this national park over several visits north; and,
• Mackinac Island State Park, the “other side of Mackinac Island.” The fudgies never get here, so it’s a day hiker’s delight, with 80% of this famed island covered in deep dark North woods and hiking trails.

Hope you can join us! The event is only open to Florida Trail Association members and their guests. To become a member of FTA, please visit their website.

Learn more – directions, logistics, and schedule – about the 28th Annual New Years Eve Campout on Meetup

It’s a full day of outdoor fun and workshops for folks who love to immerse in Florida’s good nature. I’ll be providing a presentation on Best Hikes for Florida Scrub-Jay during the event, which features biologists, naturalists, and birding enthusiasts eager to learn and share more about Florida’s most colorful endemic species.

Learn more about the Florida Scrub-Jay Festival, held by Friends of Oscar Scherer State Park.

I prefer to see – and write – more concrete statements, and a little humor is always fun. Say “Serving sailors since 1869,” or “When your grandfather got that gleam in his eye…”

Do you have any zombie-killing examples to share?

I never expected the blue.  Living in a land where ice comes in shades of white and off-gray, the brilliant blues and violets of Glacier Grey were startling, invigorating.  The lake itself a silver-gray mirror with a surface brushed roughly by the wind, dotted with chunks of glowing blue. Our journey, from Zodiac to tour boat and back again, was one of the roughest of my life, awash in giant waves and hurricane-force blasts off the ice field. But the blue, the blue, made it all worthwhile.  This corner of Torres Del Paine National Park in Chile will always occupy a corner of my soul, lit in blue.

Still squeamish about Facebook? Terrified of Twitter? Here’s how social media really works.

As the Internet evolves, the ways in which it is used as a communication medium keep expanding. Remember the excitement when websites first appeared, a new publication medium come to life? Then blogging became the topic of the day, built on tools providing individuals with a way to offer their own news, syndicating their content with little fuss and allowing their readers to comment back on it. Blogging was the first form of social media, where technology enabled the sharing of content as a conversation.

By connecting people to people, social networking takes that relationship a step further, refreshing the sense of community that too often has been lost in our busy lives.

Social networking invites you to hold ongoing conversations, often in real time, by using a variety of social media tools. It enables you to opt into a broad spectrum of relationships not just with your friends, family, and peers, but with groups rallying around causes, corporations looking for satisfied customers, and small businesses, authors and celebrities who’d like to know that you’re a fan. It enables you to build your own virtual communities around common interests and to connect to friends of friends, reducing those degrees of separation to potential business associates or clients.

Successful relationships in social networks rely on the same ground rules that you use – and probably don’t even think about – when interacting with people in everyday life. These elements form the fundamentals of social networking.

Trust
By entering into a social relationship, you trust that person to be honest in their interactions with you, and they expect the same from you.

Disclosure
Most social networking websites encourage you to share information about yourself in a user profile, including a photo of yourself; some notes about who you are and what you do; and more personal information like your hobbies, favorites books and movies, and the like. Disclosure of personal information helps build those bonds of trust, especially when you replace the network’s default icon with your own smiling face.

Respect
Social networking interactions should be carried out with respect. Just because an editor of a major magazine agreed to be part of your social network doesn’t mean you should then instant message her with queries. Continue to use the same decorum you would for everyday interactions; save the virtual snowball fights and e-cards for your close friends and family.

Sharing
Networking is about sharing. It’s not about tooting your own horn 24/7. People enter into social networking to share their observations on life, be it about the babysitter or a great blog post they just read on the elements of web design. Comment on your friend’s articles, respond to their requests for help, and share your good news and personal observations too. What you share builds trust, discloses more about yourself as a well-rounded person, and adds to your colleague’s respect for you.
Just like in real life, first impressions matter when you join a new social network or invite people to connect to your existing network. If you ask someone to join your network, include a short note to say hi and why. If someone opts in to your network and you value that relationship, welcome them. In both cases, these simple gestures help break the ice for the start of your new relationship. No need to do so in public, either—to say “thank you,” use the tools that let you communicate with them privately, which cultivates trust and a sense of intimate conversation.

To make a good first impression, put your best face forward on your profile photo and in the content you share. If you’re on a social network where you can share photos, set up a few galleries pertinent to how you want people to think about you. Guidebook authors can showcase their book covers and some images from the road. Convention and Visitor Bureaus should share destination photos. Not only does it help build your brand, but it builds interest for newcomers in what you do.

With how easy it is to sign up for social networks these days, most people plunge in without considering the impact of that crucial first impression or interactions make and break relationships. Know how and why you want to use social networking before you Join Now!

First published in the SATW Traveler,  Spring 2009

Wordpress for iPhone

One of the most delightful – and scary – realities of social media is that the distance between journalist and reader has narrowed to zero. No matter whether you work for a newspaper – where your boss now expects you to blog daily – or syndicate your own column to a paying subscriber base, there is no longer a wall between creator and consumer. Your readers will provide feedback, like it or not. Why not strengthen that bond by keeping your biggest fans coming back to you for more?

When you’re on the road, you’re in an ideal position to share your experiences – live, raw, and exotic – with your readers. These are the free apps I’ve found most effective in keeping a dialogue going with my own audience, and how I’ve used them while traveling.

Facebook: Instant Karma

Nothing gets your Facebook friends buzzing like a few choice images uploaded from a locale they’ll never visit, or a funny find – misspelled signs, weird sculpture, and other roadside kitsch – as you travel. Use the Camera app to seize the moment and the free Facebook app to share it with your peeps.

I find the Facebook app easier to use than Facebook itself. Notifications pop up at the bottom of your Live Feed, so you can see who’s left a comment and follow up on your own comments throughout this social universe.

Do you manage a business or group page on Facebook? Favorite the pages you maintain and they’ll show up on a separate screen where you can get to them quickly and share content on them as well when you travel.

Twitter and TwitPic: Sense of immediacy

Twitter is NOW. How more now can you be when roaming around with an iPhone in hand? This works especially well when you’re in a position to report about a destination while you’re reseaching it for your own purposes. Whether it’s a pre-trip or day trip during an SATW function or just a day when you’re out and about collecting information for your next article, shoot a few bits of travel savvy back to your audience as you’re on the go. See that a restaurant changed hands? Give your followers a heads-up!  Have to do an end-run around a major traffic jam? Fling that out to Twitter, and you’d be surprised how quickly, and virally, tiny bursts of information that are important to enough people keep being passed on.

TwitPic is the visual counterpart to Twitter. Like Facebook, it’s there to let you snap a photo and post it immediately. Unlike Facebook (unless you’ve left your privacy settings wide open), the entire world can see your TwitPic – and your related tweet will drive them to it. Use wisely.

Foursquare: Peek-A-Boo

A growing contingent of smart phone users have gotten into the Foursquare game. Facebook even recently added a Foursquare-like map marker so you can instantly let your followers know exactly where you are. It’s the easiest way to push a virtual pin in an online map and say “Hey, I’m here! Now follow me around!” In their own words, Foursquare is a “social city guide.” Most importantly to travel journalists, it’s quickly becoming a viable source of insider tips for best restaurants, hotels, and more, delivered instantly.

Crowdsourced competition? Yes. But you can use it to your advantage, too, by connecting it to your other social media accounts. When you sign up for Foursquare, you’re automatically prompted to connect it with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Now let’s say you’re talking a walking tour of Leipzig. Use Foursquare to check in at various landmarks, and a map of where you are pops up on Facebook. You can then snap a photo and upload it to Facebook along with a brief comment about the location.

For public relations professionals, Foursquare is a creative way to engage visitors who come to your property or destination. Since the program tracks who visits where, and awards points (and the title of “Mayor”) to people who actively show up at one location over and over again, you can reward loyal customers by offering time-limited specials. Foursquare will provide you with free analytics so you can track how many of their enthusiasts are popping up around your town. Learn more at http://foursquare.com/businesses/

WordPress: The Wrap-Up

One of my favorite uses of my iPhone while on the road is to add posts to my blogs. It beats firing up the laptop just to log in and write a post, since I can sit while I’m waiting for a bus (or on a bus), dig through my photo gallery, and write a short piece around something I saw recently.

If you’re using WordPress as a website, great! You can write new content pages right from your phone, or edit existing pages. The WordPress app enables you to manually approve or deny incoming blog comments, as well.

The downside: no scheduled posts. You can write your blog and keep it on your iPhone until you decide to publish it later, but you must manually publish the post. And it doesn’t carry the bells and whistles of your plug-ins – what you can write and embed is pretty basic, but good enough for bouncing down a dirt road in the back of a van on the way home from Patagonia. It takes practice to master typing on a tiny surface, but once you do, you’ll be hooked. No more waiting to get home (or to the hotel) to file today’s story!

Note: If you’re traveling internationally, be aware that you need to opt into a temporary international data roaming plan with your phone provider before you leave home, lest you accidently run up enormous data charges by blogging and tweeting from the streets of Leipzig. iPhone users, see http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/iphone-travel-tips.jsp for details.

First published in the SATW Traveler,  Summer 2010