Creating your dream travel companion.

A well-written travel article or guidebook is like an ideal travel companion: helpful, entertaining, rife with great ideas, and good for a couple of colorful stories. To me, an engaging travel story weaves in local characters and culture, maybe some history and geology, too. It takes me down side streets and off trail maps.

In fact, that's my strategy for writing a travel story: Get lost. If the brochure says go right, go left. If the sign says the road ends, see what's beyond it. And if a local in the Bumblebee Tavern tells me to check out a funky ghost town and draws me a map on a cocktail napkin, by all means, I take that napkin and go. Because that's how I meet the people and find the off-the-map gems that bring a travel article to life.

My travel assignments have run the gamut from skiing in northern Sweden to scuba diving in the Caribbean. I particularly enjoy stories that involve outdoor recreation, whether it be hiking, kayaking, skiing or other non-motorized sports. (I also clean up well enough to cover a five-star hotel or embark on a cruise.) I've written extensively about the Great Lakes region, ski areas of the West, and my home turf of the Pacific Northwest. My published credits include:

• Dozens of travel features for national magazines, including National Geographic Adventure, Midwest Living and Carnival Currents
• A guidebook for the National Geographic Society, Guide to America's Outdoors: The Great Lakes
• A guidebook for Avalon Travel Publishing, Moon Handbooks Michigan
• Contributing writer to One Thousand Places to See Before You Die: United States and Canada (I wrote the Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota entries)
• Contributing writer to other guidebooks published by the National Geographic Society, Midwest Living and Fodor's

You can check out a few samples at right, or contact me and I'll be happy to send you some clips. I welcome the opportunity to discuss story ideas and/or recent travels that might fit with your editorial needs.