Retirement learning curves and a video of a welsford navigator sailing!

I used to write, lots. Educational stuff, mainly for journals and it was generally well received - both the geographical and educational content. I didn’t earn anything but some journals had a high profile and it was the kudos of being academically published I guess. I just enjoyed doing it.

So, I’d like to try my hand at travel writing, not books, but small, odd articles, for a magazine or a Sunday supplement. I’m under no illusions that it will be hard and that I may be no good at all but if you don’t try, you don’t know and actually whether it gets published or not is frankly immaterial to me. The process of learning how to write, to self-critique, to search for a style, to create………that will be enjoyable enough. And you have to start somewhere!

 I want to start a new blog as well; to run alongside ‘Arwen’s Meanderings’ with direct links between the two. It will be a travel blog, its sole aim to encourage, support, inspire people to travel and meet others, to have micro-adventures. And I think we have an idea for launching it to. By ‘we’ I mean me! ‘Her indoors’ is less enamoured with this idea! ‘We’, are thinking of trying to do 14 holidays in one year around Europe for under £2500. It stems from an article we read a few weeks ago about a twenty-six-year-old who, working in a high-pressure job in London, felt he needed to maximise his downtime and so embarked on trying to do as many mini breaks as he could across Europe without taking time off!

  ‘We’ have rules for this engagement too although they change frequently at the moment. Each trip can only be 4 days long or less. On each trip, we have to pack in as much ‘free stuff to do’ and ‘cheap’ activities as our poor bodies can take. So far so good – ‘her indoors’ is onside. “No posh hotels – hostels, cheap Airbnb rooms whatever, but no ‘nice’ hotels! We have to step outside of our ‘travel comfort zone’ on occasions”. And there it was when I lost her! Don’t get me wrong, ‘Her indoors’ is a good, accomplished traveller in her own right; she’s slummed it and suffered travelling hardship and deprivation on many occasions. But I sense she is expecting something just a little more. When she retires, she’s wanting a little bit more than a hostel floor in the middle of a mosquito ridden swamp or a smelly drop pit toilet in the deserts of Namibia!

Although the blog will be for all age groups, our (my!) real target audience is our age, the fifty somethings. So, nightclubbing in Ibiza, cave tubing in Slovenia, grape picking in Italy, kite surfing in Sicily, a painting course in Paris, rowing down the Danube……..well it’s an idea! It needs refining!! A lot of refining according to ‘her indoors’.

I think I might take up vlogging as well. I have no idea why but I like editing films. Hopeless at it, never been trained, no idea what I’m doing! My YouTube channel attests to that! But I have young friends who are playwrights and script writers so I know where to go for tips and ideas and why should all the twenty somethings have vlogging to themselves?

 I want to create a channel with short videos of my micro-voyages and travel micro-adventures. More face to camera work, videos with a story to tell, a purpose. ‘How to’s’, ‘problems encountered and solved’ ‘tips’, if any, ‘suggestions and reviews ‘, ‘learn from my mistakes’ type features. I want the channel to inspire and encourage others to travel, build boats, sail, break out, pursue their dreams and ambitions, take up something new, explore; generate discussion, provide a little interlude in people’s busy, busy lives; I want it to promote my wonderful ocean city and be full of laughter, fun, warmth, humour and passion; passion for learning new things.

A tall order and I have no idea why I want to try it. I don’t even know that I have the skills or attributes to make it remotely work or of value to anyone but it’s worth a try. Nothing was ever achieved by doing nothing and if no one ever subscribes, I will still have been on a learning journey and that’s half the fun.

In the meantime, my Youtube learning curve remains exponentially vertical……today it was learning how to put in annotations. ‘Cards’ they call them and ‘subscribe’ links. I have no idea whether they work or not, whether people will like them or not. I guess it is one of those ‘suck it and see’ moments!