A Travel Writer Returns to Reality

Posted by Donna Dailey Jun 20, 2007

I returned last night from a three-week trip in the south of France, where I've been researching a new AA CityPack travel guide to Nice and the nearby Cote d'Azur. As ever, coming home brings mixed feelings.

On the one hand, if you've been slumming it in a budget hotel on a noisy street for much of the time (and on a guidebook writer's pay, I normally do), you're glad to sleep in your own bed again......until the next morning when, instead of the cawing of seagulls, you're woken by the barking of the neighbor's hateful dog, which sadly hasn't died while you were away.

Unlike the holidays your readers will enjoy, travel writing research trips can be quite exhausting. When your plane touches down, you hit the ground running, scribbling notes on airport transfer options before you've even left the terminal. Each day, you're up early and going nonstop from breakfast until late at night. To write a good guidebook, you need to visit nearly every museum and attraction in the book, and also have to check out hotel, restaurant, shopping and nightlife recommendations besides. Somehow that one day off that you've optimistically scheduled just for yourself disappears before you know it.

So coming home means, at last, a chance to wind down a little. Wishful thinking! The reality of the life you'd left behind hits you the minute you open the door.

I walked into the bedroom and thought we'd been burgled, until I remembered those last hours of packing chaos before the flight. Gradually I noticed the dead plants, the layers of dust and cobwebs, and the kitchen floor that looks as dirty as the French city streets I was walking along only a few hours ago.

The pile of post in the front hallway usually brings overdue bills and admin that needs sorting out sooner rather than later. Happily, this time it also brought a £50 win on the premium bonds which will help pay for that last blow-out meal in our favorite Nice square.

And then there are the urgent deadlines, and those patient editors waiting for the hopefully brilliant words and pictures you've promised them no later than tomorrow, having explained that it's impossible to write a piece in your hotel room when the city is putting in a new tram line along the street in front and demolishing a building at the back. Pressure? No.....

Any notion I had of leaving the unpacking until the weekend was scuppered by the need to reach those essential press packs at the bottom of the bag. All 5 kilos of them. They put me slightly over my 20 kg weight limit, but thankfully the nice man at EasyJet didn't charge me for excess baggage.

So the laundry's on and photos are downloading and it's back to reality all too quickly. But the upside of this travel writing life is that for the rest of the summer, I'll be returning to Nice and the Cote d'Azur again and again in my mind as I share my wonderful experiences there in my books, articles and, of course, with Suite101 readers.

Bonne journée!