My thanks to everyone who alerted me about the results of the 20th annual Lowell Thomas Awards in travel writing. My Slate.com essay Virgin Trail: Travels in the Other Central America won top honors in the “Internet Travel Article” category — my first Gold Award in five years of entering the competition. Of my story, the judges noted: “Writing five compelling chapters during a five-day stretch in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, Potts comes across as a contemporary mix of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. He mixes tiny details with major themes so that his account becomes irresistible.”

This is the second year in a row that a Slate.com story has won the online story category (Tim Cahill won last year with a piece about the Blues Highway). Other familiar names in the awards linup include Pico Iyer, whose Via essay “The Magic of Flight” won a Silver Award in “Personal Comment”, Tom Clynes, whose National Geographic Adventure article about Gabon won him a Bronze Award in the “Foreign Travel” category, and Jeff Greenwald, whose Burma story for Yoga Journal won a Bronze Award in “Travel News/Investigative Reporting”. Don George won a Bronze Award in the “Travel Book” category with his anthology The Kindness of Strangers, which includes a tale of mine from Lebanon. National Geographic Traveler won a Silver Award in “Special Projects” for their Taste of Travel issue, which included my short Thailand piece, “Tasting Fire in the Land of Smiles”. Travel + Leisure took top honors in the magazine category, and the Boston Globe won for best newspaper travel section. Rosemary McClure of the Los Angeles Times was named Travel Journalist of the Year.

This annual competition in 23 categories of travel writing is sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers and judged by University of Missouri journalism professors. Full results are online here.