Will Tim Cahill make me cry and what DID happen to Don George’s pants?

The regularity of my blog posts is beginning to resemble my regularity after eating too much fabulous French fromage:

Not as often as I’d like; takes too much effort to get out; and it feels better when I finally get something out of my system.

All right, that’s about enough of that analogy.

I have been absent from the scene gathering great material and having great fun doing it.

I had a recent kayak trip that ended with lots of wine, so you know that has to be good.

And I have been busy preparing for a trip I had not expected which will take me to the other side of the planet. Part of that preparation included getting training into getting gassed, which you would think would come naturally.  But this gas is somewhat exotic and requires getting tanked.

More to come on both of those items.  But currently I am on assignment (I love saying that as it sounds like I am a real journalist) to a travel writers and photographers conference north of San Francisco.

I will have more to say about this later, but I got to meet my mentor in the genre of adventure travel writing, the iconic author who pretty much invented the style that many of us strive for but few achieve, that being of course, Tim Cahill. 

Tim’s past goes back from Rolling Stone magazine and then Outside Magazine (when it used to be good).

He has written and edited a wonderful collection of very memorable books and articles.

Tim sat with another internationally known travel writer, Don George, and discussed the art of travel writing.

Cahill has a long background of participating and teaching at writers conferences and for some reason, apparently Tim’s critiquing has lead to more than one participant ending in tears. Based on some of the examples of writing that Cahill has been subjected to maybe it should have been Tim that ended up crying.

Of course, all of us wannabe travel writers wanted to hear Tim divulge his secrets for turning a travel trip into a travel story. Hopefully as the four-day conference progresses I will have an answer to this crucial question.

For anybody who has followed Cahill’s writing for twenty years will understand that Tim Cahill is no superman:

he just writes super.

As to what happened to Don George’s pants; as far as I could make out, there is a back-story to a seersucker outfit that Don wears.  He had his seersucker coat on but no pants. 

It was not clear what happened to those pants but the good news is he was speaking from behind a podium.

Not that there’s anything wrong with no seersucker pants…I’m just not into it.

As a follow-up to the writers conference, today I had the absolute, incredible luck to have had lunch with the maestro himself, Mr. Cahill.  I learned in one hour than I will probably learn from a week of classroom instruction.  Truly a unforgetable experience and well worth the price of admission.

And for those who were worried about the state of Don George’s bare legs–that never were–today he found his seersucker pants.  While I won’t say he is as good looking as his writing and editing, he did cut a fine figure in his complete outfit.

Not that I was looking at his pants all that closely. 

Not that there’s anything wrong that practice…I’m just not into it.