Back in Asia

Just a heads-up for those of you surfing in this week. After two months of touring the United States to promote my book, I am currently back in Asia -- Japan, at the moment. In due course I’ll head down to Thailand for more travel and writing projects.

If you’ve been following this blog in recent weeks, you will notice that my Book Tour Diary has been a bit stagnant. There is a reason for this -- namely, that I have been forsaking the virtual world for the real one. After doing a quick brainstorm this morning, I tallied that I reunited with over 70 individual old friends and family members during my book tour across the USA. Some (such as my West Coast and Kansas friends) I hadn’t seen in a year; some (such as my friend Jason Young in Texas) I hadn’t seen since I was working in Colorado as a teenager; some (like Jeff Good and his mother in Wichita) I hadn’t seen since junior high school. When I added everyone together, I realized that -- if you tally all the missing years together -- I had just short of 400 years of catching up to do between all of my friends! Hence, my book tour blog fell disastrously behind. Rest assured that I will give you the full book tour retrospective in time.

Elsewhere, cheers to Jen Leo for noting that Vagabonding saw some nice expoure in the Christian Science Monitor last week. Indeed, I haven’t been blogging much of the Vagabonding coverage of late -- but it has been largely positive and encouraging. For example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also ran a story about long-term travel, and I’ve also gotten nice reviews and/or profiles of late in the San Francisco Examiner, the Boston Globe, Outpost Magazine, the Dallas Morning News, and Toronto’s Globe and Mail. I’ve linked brief outtakes from these pieces on Vagabonding.net, and slightly longer blurbs on RolfPotts.com.

On a final note, I’ll probably put my Travel Quote of the Day blog feature on hold for the next week or so -- at least until I’m back and settled in Thailand. These quotes (which I hope have been somewhat thought-provoking for vagabonders out there) give the blog a bit of grist when I’m too busy to post on other topics. Now that there is a war raging in Iraq, however, I’m going to put the quotes on hold for awhile. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still an enthusiastic advocate of world travel -- I just want to wait until I have the time to carefully consider what I present for discussion.

More when I return from Japan…