After three years of monthly interviews with travel writers at RolfPotts.com, I was finally able to track down a longtime favorite of mine, Tim Cahill. I will feature an interview with him on the site in January, but — in the spirit of the holidays — I wanted to give Vagablogging readers a sneak preview, which can be found in its entirety here.

Without a doubt, Tim provided me with my funniest interview yet. “I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years,” he says, “but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant. So I kept my ambition a secret, like masturbation.”

Cahill goes on to tell of his early forays into writing, his involvement with Rolling Stone magazine, his founding of Outside magazine, and the challenges of reporting from remote places. His advice to aspiring travel writers is as follows:

1. This is not a way to make a lot of money.

2. The travel is difficult on your relationships with loved ones, unless they are coming along with you, which may not be possible. (see #1 above.)

3. If you are not in it for the money, it is — in my opinion — the best job in American journalism.

4. Editors, for the most part, don