Why I Left an Enviable Career in Travel Writing for PR: A First-Person Perspective

In 2003, a multifaceted lifestyle crisis that I’d been cultivating for two years went supernova. During a Top 5 of All-Time hangover, I hatched swift and irreversible plans to quit my nine-year career with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, sell my house, car and all my belongings, and flee the country. I told my wide-eyed friends and coworkers that I intended to travel until the money ran out then come home, but I was also simmering the idea of becoming a travel writer, despite having no training, no connections and no clue. Amazingly, I engineered a career as a freelance writer (mainly in travel), which endured for over 11 years. I spent the first four and a half years nomadically wandering through Europe and Asia-Pacific. I lived for extended periods in Spain, Romania, and Italy. As my experience and clippings grew, so did my opportunities. I did five-star site visits to Istanbul; Kaikoura, New Zealand; Sapporo, Japan; Hong Kong; Umbria; and Guam and Saipan. I went on a luxury fly fishing cruise in Chile’s Patagonia region and rode Australia’s famed Indian-Pacific railway from Perth to Sydney in a first-class cabin. In a fortuitous turn of events, I landed the brass ring assignment of researching Tuscany for Lonely Planet -- twice. In 2007, I re-settled in my hometown of Minneapolis where I continued working steadily, almost frantically at times, as lucrative work piled up with barely any pitching effort on my part. In 2010, I earned more money than I had at the peak of my Federal Reserve career. The Turning Point Then the tailspin began. I went through a burnout period in 2011 after the sadistic pace of 2010. Opportunities started declining as cheap/free/user generated, “meh, good enough” content flooded the in