Travels With Jim and Rita
Discussing the challenges, rewards, and drawbacks of living overseas. Follow our decision to sell our home and live abroad until the housing market adjusts. Information for the would-be expat, digital nomad, roving retiree, or just plain traveler. Host Jim Santos is a published travel writer with over 200 articles and seven books (jimsantos.net). He and his wife Rita lived in Ecuador for 6 years, and are currently test-driving the roving retirement lifestyle. Jim is also the host of the popular "International Living Podcast".
Travels With Jim and Rita
Episode 30 - Culinary and Travel Adventures with Amy Piper
What does it take to leave a stable career in Corporate America and become a globetrotting travel writer? Join us as we journey with Amy Piper, who did just that! Amy's transition is nothing short of inspiring, and she brings us along on her adventures from a thrilling photo safari in Tanzania to an eagerly anticipated culinary expedition in Italy. Her tales of unusual foods will fascinate both travel enthusiasts and food lovers.
Discover the magic of finding hidden culinary gems during U.S. road trips. We've gathered priceless tips on spotting the best local eateries, including observing where public utility workers dine and tapping into the wisdom of transportation workers. Plus, Amy gives us a sneak peek into her latest book, "Secret Michigan: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure," filled with unique attractions and amusing anecdotes from her extensive travels across Michigan. Ever heard of the Anatomy of Death Museum in Mount Clemens? You won't want to miss this!
If you've ever dreamt of becoming a travel writer, this episode is a treasure trove of insights. Amy shares her experiences and tips on writing about both Midwest and international destinations. She discusses her book "A Hundred Things to Do in Lansing, Michigan Before You Die" and her contributions to "Midwest Road Trip Adventures." Learn about essential resources for aspiring writers, like Travel Writers University and Nomadic Matt's blogging course. Don't forget to check out our blog at jimsantosbooks.com for more travel stories, updates, and to connect with us!
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Welcome to Travels with Jim and Rita. Jim and Rita, I'm your host, jim Santos, and in this podcast series you can follow along as my wife, rita and I work out our crazy plan to outfox the real estate market in the US and actually increase our retirement nest egg by spending the next three years or so living abroad and exploring the world. Are we bold, forward-thinking pioneers or just plain nuts? Let's find out together, shall we? Hello, and welcome once again to Travels with Jim and Rita. We're still working our way through Eastern Europe using trains, buses and, eventually, ferries, and we'll have some stories from our journeys in the coming weeks. Check out our blog at jimsantosbooks. com for more timely updates on our travel and pictures of where we've been. I've been looking forward to this interview.
Jim Santos:Amy Piper is a freelance travel writer, blogger, photographer and author, specializing in luxury and multi-generational travel. You can find her blog on her website, followthepipercom. She's a native Michigander who travels through the lens of a food lover and has been to 41 countries and 45 states. From getting chased by bomb-sniffing dogs in the middle of the night in Bogota to being refused boarding her plane from Buenos Aires to Paraguay due to the wrong visa, amy has always had an exciting adventure to tell her readers and community of travel enthusiasts. In 2022, amy was recognized as the Greater Lansing Certified Tourism Ambassador Star of the Year and she's a published author of three best-selling travel books on Amazon Midwest Road Trip Adventures 100 Things to Do in Lansing Before you Die. And Secret Michigan A Guide to the Weird, wonderful and Obscure Amy. Welcome to Travels with Jim and Rita.
Amy Piper:Hi Jim, Hi Rita, how are you today? Great.
Jim Santos:Oh, just fine. Well, Amy, let's start with a little background on yourself. How did a Michigan girl turn into such a travel adventurer?
Amy Piper:Well, I always had an interest in languages, so my undergraduate major was Spanish and linguistics and I got a master's degree in linguistics and I went to work for Corporate America. I got a PhD in instructional design and I applied that to corporate training and project management. So I went to work in Corporate America as an IT program project manager and they ended up sending me all over the world. I spent six months in Seoul, six months in Argentina, three months in Madrid, and so I finally was sitting in Argentina and said I'd like to keep doing this when I retire, but I've got to figure out a way. And so I took a travel writing class, and first it was online, and then I took a three-day workshop and at the end of the three-day workshop, they gave a 30-day challenge to go get published somewhere, and I did, and I never looked back. That was in 2016. And today I have one collaborative book and two sole author books. So it's been quite a ride in a fairly short amount of time.
Amy Piper:And you do travel photography as well amount of time and you do travel photography as well. I do. I just handed in about 80 photos for a destination. I did a photo safari to Tanzania and I have another African photo safari coming up in November. It's not all photos in that case, but there are some specific photo opportunities, so that should be a fun one.
Jim Santos:Do you remember what was your first trip when you went abroad?
Amy Piper:I would say my very first one is, if you can kind of count this as an American, you always go to Canada, but my very first trip to Europe was Paris in the late 90s.
Jim Santos:It's a nice place to start.
Amy Piper:Then I just kept going until one year. I actually worked and taught on six continents.
Rita Santos:Wow.
Jim Santos:Wow, so you were a digital nomad before it became fashionable.
Amy Piper:Yes, yeah, I definitely was, but I wasn't so much working remotely. I would go to these places and work with local IT professionals. Oh I see organizations do certain projects for them. Depending on what it was, I was really a consultant in the whole area of program project management.
Jim Santos:That must have been a very exciting time.
Amy Piper:It certainly was. So I wanted to keep that excitement going after I retired, and so now I'm just as busy today as I ever was. I've been retired for about a year and a half and I'm constantly on the go. I just finished a month-long well 25-days book tour of Michigan and Indiana. Indiana was more conferences, but I traveled with a gal who wrote Secret Kansas Roxy on the Road and so she came and we went all over Michigan and I did eight book events in 25 days. A little tiring, yeah, it was.
Jim Santos:Where are you off to next?
Amy Piper:Wednesday I leave for Petoskey and I'm doing another week long tour, not for books but just to gather information to write Throughout Michigan. I'm going to go from Petoskey to Traverse City, to Detroit for a week with another travel writer and then I'll be home. And then I'm going to Italy. In September, late August, september, I'm going to Italy for two weeks.
Rita Santos:That's one of our favorites, yeah.
Amy Piper:I've been there a couple of times and I just I'm going to do a foodie tour. I write a lot through a foodie lens and so I have a special kind of tour set up just for me. That's covering Milan to Rome, and we're also going to take in a day trip to Switzerland and Lake Como. That's cool.
Rita Santos:Yeah.
Jim Santos:Yeah, you're bringing up my favorite travel subject there food. Let's talk about food. Okay, yeah, what's the most unusual food you've tried on your travels?
Amy Piper:Oh gee, that's a hard one.
Jim Santos:For me, one of them would, or two of them would have been in Ecuador. One was called guatita, which is basically a Is that the guinea pig? No, it's a stew that it's kind of I think it's mostly sheep intestines and like a gravy and served over rice, and the other would be a locro de sangre, basically a potato soup, but the de sangre part is blood.
Amy Piper:Right Of what.
Jim Santos:Fried sheep blood and a couple other little things like that tossed into it, and it's actually quite good.
Amy Piper:I would say in Korea I tried a lot of unusual vegetables for me, like lotus root, typical dishes that you might find in the United States, like shrimp made in different ways, like the cafeteria one day served a shrimp loaf and I'd certainly never heard of that.
Rita Santos:Right.
Amy Piper:Kind of like a meatloaf made with shrimp.
Jim Santos:Made with shrimp right.
Amy Piper:Yeah, that was kind of weird. Oh, in my book. We have a restaurant here called Joe's Gizzard City in Charlotte, Michigan. And that's in my book under kind of the weird category and they pretty much they serve other things, but they're known, renowned throughout the United States for their chicken gizzards and while some people may not think that's weird, I'm kind of that's pretty unusual, yeah.
Rita Santos:Yeah, it's all about the texture for me. I don't think I could do it. The organ meats are out for me.
Jim Santos:Yeah, have you run into anything you really just couldn't stomach? You know if you'll pardon the pun.
Amy Piper:Oh, I remember a story there was. I went to this bar every night in Madrid that was across the street from where a group of us met to go for dinner, and we generally either have a drink or an appetizer before we went to dinner. And I said to the guy I said to him in Spanish, I want something different tonight, Because usually I was eating the potato and ham croquettes and I thought he was going to suggest something. But oh no, he just brings me these fried chuffy things. And so I'm thinking, okay, that's pretty okay. I started chewing, and chewing, and chewing and then I asked the guy next to me what it was and he said fried pig skins and I literally gagged. Oh yeah, Automatic gagging.
Jim Santos:Well, you have to admit that is different. Yeah, we had an experience in a restaurant in Venice once where we asked for the menus and the waiter said do you trust me? I said, well, is there a menu? He said do you trust me? And he asked us you know, carne o peixe, do you want meat or fish? Yeah, but news that, do you trust me? And he asked us you know, uh, carne a pesce, do you want meat or fish?
Jim Santos:but uh, it turned out to be a wonderful experience I mean, they just continued to bring out dish after dish that was served family style at the table oh and uh I think we're there about three and a half hours yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rita Santos:And he, because he had to have you drink a certain wine with a certain dish and and then then it got completely down to meet my wife and drink some grappa. Was that what?
Jim Santos:it was called Grappa.
Rita Santos:Grappa I said, oh my Lord, I think we need to go back to the hotel.
Jim Santos:So I'm sure you'll have a great time when you get back to Italy.
Rita Santos:Oh yeah.
Amy Piper:Yes, we're doing pasta making classes, a lot of cooking classes and olive oil tasting, I think, or maybe that's in one of the African ones that we're going to. So I like to take the cooking classes and that way I can take that food home and be able to make it authentically when I return home.
Jim Santos:I've always wanted to do that but never took the time for the classes. I do try to reconstruct them when I get home, but how have those cooking classes been? Have you enjoyed those experiences?
Amy Piper:Oh, definitely. My daughter and I did one in New Orleans where we did gumbo and I don't know a variety of other items.
Jim Santos:Talk about a foodie destination.
Amy Piper:Yes, it was wonderful. And then in Santa Fe we went to a. It was more of a demonstration, but we got the recipes in making your own tortillas and using hatch green chilies, and I didn't think you could get those where I'm located here in Michigan but it turns out in August they have them available at some of the local stores.
Jim Santos:Yeah, when you travel, you run into ingredients that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of yourself.
Amy Piper:Yeah, and then you have to figure out how to source them, but in this day and age you can get a lot of things ordered on the internet. They send them shipped on ice, and so that expands your ingredients a little bit.
Jim Santos:Now, one of the things I saw mentioned on your website was you have enjoyed multi-generational travel. What exactly do you mean by that? Is that taking the kids and the grandkids?
Amy Piper:There's two types. I'm starting to talk more about skip-gen travel, which is different for a bit from multi-generational travel. Multi-generational travel is just several generations. So my husband and I, my daughter and my two granddaughters, frequently travel together. Sometimes it's just my like two weekends ago it was just my daughter and one granddaughter and I. It depends on who's available and who I can kind of convince to go to wherever I want to go. So that's multi-generational, just several generations going together. And then the other skip gen is where the grandparents skip taking their children and take their grandchildren. So it's just you and your grandchildren.
Jim Santos:That's the kind your children probably like the best. Yes, you can take the kids for a while.
Rita Santos:We have nine grandchildren oh wow. We have traveled with them, but it's kind of hard with the little ones not to travel without their parents.
Amy Piper:Well, my daughter almost loves to travel as much as I do. She was brought up with it when she had her school breaks. When she was about 12 was the year I was going to Korea for six months. So some of her friends at school they were talking about where they were going on their summer vacation and she said well, I'm going to Seoul. And someone said is that anywhere near Ohio?
Jim Santos:It's up by Saginaw, right yeah.
Amy Piper:So she has traveled throughout the world with me, and so has my oldest granddaughter, but we're just trying now to get a passport for the five-year-old, so we'll see how it goes.
Jim Santos:Yeah, but we both think that that's one of the best things you can do for kids and grandkids is to introduce them to travel at an early age.
Amy Piper:Well, the youngest one claims she wants to be a travel writer, just like Gigi. And the last time she got $5, she spent it on a notebook.
Rita Santos:Good for her, yes.
Jim Santos:Rita and I, we're focused right now more on international travel while we're physically able, but we can foresee a time when we're a bit too old for schlepping around airports with our baggage, so we can appreciate the joys of finding places to travel in the US or more locally. You've been to, I think, 45 states Correct, so which ones have you missed?
Amy Piper:West Virginia oh shame, shame, shame. South Carolina, Idaho, Utah and Alaska.
Rita Santos:Alaska, okay, oh, yeah, yeah.
Amy Piper:I keep trying to plan an Alaska cruise and then for West Virginia, I mean for Michigan, that's just on the other side of Ohio.
Rita Santos:Right no-transcript.
Amy Piper:That tucked in pretty quickly.
Jim Santos:On your way to South Carolina.
Rita Santos:Yeah, it's a beautiful mountain state. It is absolutely gorgeous.
Amy Piper:Yeah, so those are the ones I have to knock off.
Jim Santos:Do you have any particular strategy when you're exploring the US, or is it just wherever the jobs take you?
Amy Piper:Well, it was wherever the jobs take me. Recently I've been exploring the flyover states because there were quite a few of those I hadn't been to, like Nebraska and Iowa, and I'm kind of here to tell you that they're not really flyover states, they're really destinations in and of themselves. There's just so many wonderful places there. It's almost shocking that I went to a small town, fairfield, iowa, and they have some of the best art. They had a little art gallery and you could walk right in and there were paintings from world renowned painters and it was amazing.
Jim Santos:Yeah, it sounds like it.
Amy Piper:It was just tucked away in this little town and it's amazing. And on the other side, you know, some would argue that it should be more for everyone to see and not very many people will ever see it. But I feel like everybody should have art. Yes, so yeah.
Jim Santos:One of the things we enjoy about road trips in the U? S is, again, food related when you just stop at a random place in a small town and it turns out to have some of the best food you've ever had in your life.
Amy Piper:Oh yeah, and I have a on my website. Follow the papercom. I have a download If you sign up for my email list. That's how to choose the best restaurants for you while on vacation and it gives some hints and tips for spotting good restaurants when you're in a town you don't know.
Jim Santos:That could be very useful.
Amy Piper:Yeah.
Jim Santos:We tend to, when we're traveling, look to see where the public utility workers are eating, or the police.
Amy Piper:Yes, oh, that's a good tip. I kind of look at who's got a full parking lot, but also looking at recommendations, if the place has been recommended three times. That was a tip that I learned quite a while ago Look for places that have been recommended at least three times. And then I also, if I'm flying into a place like I flew into Gulf Shores and the first thing I do is ask the shuttle driver, where do you eat, what do you recommend? And I started talking about the places I had on my list what do you recommend? And I started talking about the places I had on my list and he's like oh yeah, all the tourists go there. Where you really should go is here.
Rita Santos:Right.
Amy Piper:It's very useful to chat up some of the transportation workers.
Jim Santos:Yeah, we usually try to talk to the driver. If we get a ride from the airport into town, we usually try to talk to them about where they've been or what they'd like to do, and often they'll give you a card with their phone number on it and tell you when you want to go to these places. Give me a call and make sure you get there.
Jim Santos:Well about your books. Your most recent is Secret Michigan, a Guide to the Weird, wonderful and Obscure. That was probably a fun book to write, but I was curious how you came up with that topic.
Amy Piper:Well, it's a series by Reedy Press. I wrote my first book, 100 Things to Do in Lansing Before you Die, with Reedy Press and I wanted to after that do a state book and I had wanted to do Unique Eats and Eateries but it was still coming out of the pandemic and so they suggested that I do Secret Michigan because it is one of their series. In the previous year I had been in Kansas with an author writing that same book, exploring and seeing where she went and how she found the various places, and so that kind of piqued. My interest in that is to get the backstories behind some of the more popular places. And then that book also includes some of the world's largest things. That's always a fun thing. How did that world's largest come to be and what's the backstory behind that? And then just some obscure things that you don't even realize exist.
Jim Santos:Well, that must have taken quite a while to write.
Amy Piper:Yeah, it took over a year. I signed the contract somewhere around August and then I handed it in September the following year, so it just came out. And then from September until April it was going through edits and layout, so it just came out April 1st. So it's almost brand spanking new.
Jim Santos:So you must have had to do a lot of research, a lot of traveling around Michigan to write this book.
Amy Piper:Oh yes, last year at this time I was frantically scheduling tours and interviews and trying to get it all in. I started early, but there never was enough time.
Jim Santos:I can imagine you had an adventure or two along the way for that.
Amy Piper:I sure did. Recently I took a friend to Sault Ste Marie and I had been when I was a kid and then, when I was researching my book, I did the locks tour. But I wanted to take her through the locks. And then there was another tour that extended out to lighthouses. So we did that and she had just gotten her passport, or renewed her passport, and she goes oh, let's go to breakfast in Sault Ste Marie, ontario. I said okay, let's go. Well, it's a simple matter. You would think of going across the bridge. If you think about it in retrospect, you should be driving on the right side of the road. But when you went on the right side of the road it didn't look like it went across the bridge, and so Is it just the way the bridge was made?
Jim Santos:you mean it looked like it?
Amy Piper:didn't Correct. It looked like the way the bridge you crossed. It was to the left and there were two lanes. So one lane was coming in. You kind of assumed the other lane was going out. And there were many clues that this wasn't the right thing, but only in retrospect. So we started through. I said to my friend which way? Where do we go? I was a little confused and she pointed and I followed and we ended up trying to exit the second lane of the entrance. When we did that there were only four cars lined up to come into the United States. When this fiasco was over it was backed up 20 cars at least.
Amy Piper:Because, we were trying to leave the country through an entrance.
Jim Santos:Through an entrance. Yeah, oh my God, Way to run.
Amy Piper:I mean, we had like six agents come running out and it turned out they they admitted that this happens almost daily. So after they said that I didn't feel so bad don't maybe put up a sign? Yeah, yeah, put up better signage please yes, but that was my latest adventure, like he. He came running out and afterwards he said I thought I was going to have to tackle you and I was going to have some excitement. And it was just like just this little old lady.
Jim Santos:Now in this book you say you have the weird, the wonderful and the obscure. What was one of the weird things that you ran into in Michigan? The?
Amy Piper:wonderful and the obscure. What was one of the weird things that you ran into in Michigan? Well, I would say there's an anatomy of death museum in Mount Clemens. There's the Joe's Gizzard City, which I just think chicken gizzards and a restaurant devoted to. That is kind of weird. So those are a couple of the things that immediately come to mind.
Jim Santos:How about the wonderful part?
Amy Piper:Oh, there are so many things. I talked about the Secret Garden which is in Traverse City. It's affiliated with Brise Winery and Vineyards and it is a secret garden that is in bloom right now. And it's a secret garden that is in bloom right now and it's lavender fields and it's kind of tucked down behind and around the winery and when you come over the hill the whole field is just a bloom with lavender and it's just wonderful.
Jim Santos:Well, it smells very good too.
Amy Piper:It does. My granddaughter was like, oh, can we smell them? And the minute you opened the windows it was just filled with the aroma of lavender. So that was fun.
Jim Santos:Well, to round out the trio, then, how about the obscure? What's one of the obscure things about Michigan?
Amy Piper:Many of you have probably heard of the old rugged cross. The Old Rugged Cross, Well, I never knew. That was written in Michigan. It was written in Albion, Michigan. But there's this little town called Reed City in Northwest Michigan it's not a coastal town, Reed City and there's a historical museum there where they have his piano and his guitar and kind of his whole story of George Bernard and how he came to write this hymn that people sing all over the world. So that was kind of obscure. Also, Alpena, in the shipwreck alley there's shipwrecks under this Lake Huron and you can take a glass-bottom boat tour and see the shipwrecks. So that's a bit obscure.
Rita Santos:Yeah, it is.
Amy Piper:Yeah, and then here's another interesting fact the SS Badger. That goes from Ludington, Michigan, to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. That is the only officially designated extension of a US highway and it's an extension of US 10, and it goes. The boat continues the highway from Ludington to Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
Jim Santos:So when you're on the boat, you're on the extension of the highway.
Amy Piper:Yeah, interesting, correct yeah.
Jim Santos:Well, how about your other two books?
Amy Piper:A Hundred Things to Do in Lansing. That's Lansing Michigan Before you Die. And that book has five sections food and drink, music and entertainment, shopping and fashion, history and culture and sports and recreation. And really there are more than a hundred things in the book because there are several. There are more than 100 things in the book because there are several. Like, if I talked about breweries I might list several other breweries that you could go to that were top net. And the other thing about that book is there's so many new things coming out and changing, coming out and changing. There's so many more things to do. But one thing I like to tell people about Lansing Michigan is that you can go every weeknight in the summer, monday through Friday, and see a free concert.
Rita Santos:Oh, that's nice.
Amy Piper:There's always something new. People are always surprised when I say there's 100 things to do here.
Jim Santos:And there's quite a bit of information on your website, ohio, and one on Lafayette.
Amy Piper:West Lafayette, Indiana, places to eat. That was just published over the weekend. So constantly adding to that and giving itineraries. If you're looking for places to go and things to do in the Midwest, that's a good resource for you. But I also have some stories, like from my photo safari in Tanzania. So if you go there and in the search bar search for Tanzania, you'll find an article on the great wildebeest migration, for example.
Rita Santos:I read that that was very nice, exciting.
Amy Piper:Very exciting. Can't wait to go now to South Africa, and I'm going to South Africa, botswana, zambia and Zimbabwe, so I'm hoping to have some more stories.
Jim Santos:We've had a couple guests on the show who spoke very highly of South Africa.
Rita Santos:Right Spent six months there. Really enjoyed their time there, yeah.
Amy Piper:Yeah, yeah. So I'm looking forward to that. And then my other book it was kind of funny, that happened during the pandemic. It's called Midwest Road Trip Adventures and that's a collaborative work between there are 12 Midwest states and we had 12 authors and I'm part of the Midwest Travel Network and the owner of that, or the co-owner, called me and she said somebody's going to call you and just say yes, and I'm thinking, okay, well, we'll see what that is all about.
Amy Piper:And a gal called and asked if I would write the Michigan chapter in Midwest Road Trip adventures. And we were in the height of the pandemic and I knew a lot of the Michigan highway. So I picked four kind of scenic road trips and my daughter and I did a lot of outdoor activities and just checked out places that we could go safely and stayed at some people's cottages we knew and were able to do a little additional research for the book and that was really my first foray into authorship and so I wrote the Michigan chapter and then each state had their own author. One author, the one from Illinois she has won an Emmy for her writing, so it's really well done. It was a bestseller on Amazon for a while and now it's in its second edition. So that was my first step. And then many of those authors had written for Reedy Press and so that's kind of how I heard about pitching Reedy Press for books and that's how I got my first book.
Jim Santos:That's great, that's always nice to have those connections, that kind of paved the way for that. Do you think there is a international travel book in your future?
Amy Piper:Maybe you never know, I particularly love Argentina.
Rita Santos:Oh, us too.
Amy Piper:I just love that. I don't know if it was because I majored in Spanish and so I had a pretty good command of the language or what, yeah, but I just felt very at home there.
Jim Santos:We've only been to Buenos Aires, but we really enjoyed it.
Rita Santos:We really loved it.
Amy Piper:I had an opportunity being there six months. People on my team would some of them had cars and they would take me on day trips throughout the region, and then my husband and I went to the Perito Marino Glacier in Calafate, which was southern, and then I went to Iguazu Falls one weekend all by myself. That was kind of everybody's like who's taking you and I'm like I'm taking myself.
Jim Santos:Do you do much solo traveling, or is your husband able to come along with you for some of these?
Amy Piper:He comes sometimes, but a couple of times now I've been going with other writers, but when I was traveling for work, you know, I was by myself on the weekend, so he wasn't with me on those because he worked here in the States. I always had to go by myself, but I typically took a tour of some type when I went. For example, I had to go from South Korea, I had to leave the country for the weekend to renew my visa and I wanted to go to mainland China, but I wasn't comfortable just going randomly, and so what I ended up doing was I mean, this was 25 years ago, so things were kind of different I ended up taking a tour to Hong Kong for the weekend.
Rita Santos:Oh, that would be, a good one.
Amy Piper:It was right before the handover, so they had a countdown to the handover.
Jim Santos:Exciting.
Amy Piper:Yeah, it was very fun.
Jim Santos:Do you have any advice for people who are listening to this and thinking they might like to try their hand at travel writing? Do you have any advice for where they should start?
Amy Piper:I started with Great Escape Publishing, which was a great place for weekend workshops and those kinds of things placed for weekend workshops and those kinds of things. That's no longer in business per se. They have the Travel Writers Cafe, which is a Facebook group under Travel Writers University. That's a place you can get started where they have some workshops and some of those people were people who learned from Great Escape Publishing, so that would be a place that you could start and they have a paid subscription Facebook group with lots of material and information. So that's a good place to start.
Amy Piper:I would say Also Nomadic Matt nomadicmatt. com. He has a blogging course and a travel writing course. I've taken both of those and then there's just numerous like Leslie Peterson has a subscription group. That's wonderful. That's helped me a lot. So I've just taken classes here and there. Occasionally I've had chances to take courses or workshops from big-name writers, like going to a conference. At Nomadic Maps Conference. He had Don George, who's a very well-known travel writer, provide workshops, so I was able to learn some things from him, and Nick O'Connor some of the bigger names. I've never been really afraid to invest in learning about my craft and my skill, so I think that's important. I think sometimes you can learn a lot from those things that would take you forever to learn otherwise. So yeah, I would suggest, if you're really interested, go ahead and make an investment. I mean, it'll start out as a hobby, and with any hobby you invest money and you buy things. So that's kind of how it started for me. I never imagined that within six years I would have these books and all of that.
Jim Santos:Well, we've been talking with Amy Piper. She's a photographer, writer, lover of fine food from around the country and around the world. For more information, check out her website at followthepiper. com and we'll have links to that and her Amazon page for her books in the show notes. Amy, it's been a pleasure and thanks for joining us on Travels with Jim and Rita.
Amy Piper:Well, thanks, Jim and Rita. Happy to have had a chance to talk to you.
Rita Santos:Same here.
Jim Santos:You've been listening to Travels with Jim and Rita. Thank you for your support and please continue to like, follow and promote on social media as you're able. Now. Subscriptions are not required, but of course, they're always appreciated. Don't forget to the. Rita and I will be at the International Living Ultimate Go Overseas Boot Camp in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 26 through the 28th. I'm going to be given four talks there and Rita and I will both be in the exhibit hall to answer your questions about our travels and where we're going.
Jim Santos:You can get more information or sign up at intliving. com/ events, but do it quickly, because it looks like it's selling out. If you'd like to read more about where we've been and see some photos and video, check out our blog at jimsantosbooks. com, and you can access my books, audiobooks and short stories at jimsantos. net. We'd love to hear from our listeners as well, so if you have a question or a topic you'd like us to cover, or if you want to tell your own travel story, email us at jim@ jimsantosbooks. com, and you'll find those links and others to our Instagram account and our YouTube account in the show notes. Now, until next time, remember we travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us.
