I don’t think it was hard to make 2023 a better year than its predecessor , but regardless, I have very few regrets from this past year and a lifetime’s worth of new memories. It was a banner year from a professional standpoint, not to mention some life-changing travels and plenty of quality time spent with my family and friends.
Here’s how 2023 shook out for us.
2023 in travel
There’s never been a year-end recap where travel wasn’t a main focus, and 2023 was no different. I didn’t take as many flights as years’ past, logging just 29 including connections. But several of those flights were very long indeed as our big trip for the year was 17 days in Africa , split between Cape Town and Namibia . The best part of that trip, aside from exploring new cultures and landscapes, was doing so with six people who mean the world to me. I highly recommend traveling with your friends on epic adventures like this one.
SVV and I also went to Maui for 11 days for my 40th birthday in February, a perk of learning how to hack the credit card points game . I learned long ago to book a sunny vacation during winter months to escape the seasonal depression, and our 2024 one—also thanks to points—is coming up very soon to a pair of countries new to both of us!
Namibia aside, the new places I went in 2023 were to Tucson with SVV and Emilie for our annual board retreat and to Madison, Wisconsin, where I attended a PRSA conference. I didn’t get a ton of time outside of the Madison event to explore, but I liked what I did see and would love to go back. And of course, Arizona always has my heart—and I was thrilled to check off a new national park, Saguaro NP.
I went to New Orleans with my sister for another friend’s 40th celebration, and SVV and I found ourselves in California twice: in San Francisco in July to attend a friend’s wedding, and in Sacramento in November for a quick visit with his parents. While on the West Coast, we flew up to Portland, Oregon for four days—a destination we had never visited together. He was born in Portland but last visited in 1997, while I haven’t been since 2003, so it essentially was a novelty for both of us.
I also took three trips with my friend Kelly: one to her parents’ home on Lake Keowee in South Carolina, one to the Smoky Mountains in fall and one to see our friend Emily in Louisville in the summer. We saw a pair of concerts together: Beyoncé and Taylor, who I was lucky enough to catch on the Eras tour twice … so far.
I went back to Kentucky the month after our girls’ trip to Louisville and spent a whole week in the Cincinnati area: the first half on a content project with Northern Kentucky , the second half to go to the Cincy Open (Western & Southern) tennis tournament with my mom. We’re big tennis fans, and after Indian Wells a couple years ago, we vowed to visit a new tournament each year going forward. In 2024, that will be Roland Garros!
We went to Mississippi twice for conferences— Tupelo in the spring, Cleveland in the fall—and bopped back and forth to Alabama several times for both fun and work, like a recent birding project we’re wrapping up. I put a good 20,000 miles on my car as so much of our work travel was in the Southern region, many places remote and extremely rural.
I traveled to Memphis three times to see my cousins where the routine is always “pool, bourbon, puzzles,” and we also made several visits to Knoxville, for Governor’s Conference meetings, for actual Governor’s Conference, to see my extended family and for a content project with Visit Knoxville .
2023 in writing
I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many freelance pieces I wrote this year. Some of my favorites were for Washington Post —about paint , aging in place , framing , pet photography , secret rooms —and Garden & Gun ( this story on small Smokies towns even made it onto the list of their top travel pieces of the year). I also finished a huge content project for Travel + Leisure and Food + Wine recently recently and wrote several articles on Nashville and Tupelo for Southern Living , as well as wrote features for hotel magazines and other specialty pubs like Bourbon+ .
I hardly pitched anything this year simply due to bandwidth and existing contract gigs that were top priority, and if I did it was to an editor with whom I already had a relationship. This year was my seventh year writing the Tennessee section for AAA Living— which translates to working on more than 40 print issues in addition to being on the cover last year—and after hearing they were folding the print issue back in the summer, I was elated to hear from the team a month later that they were hiring for contributors back to work on the digital section and really beef it up.
One big sacrifice I’ve had to make over the past few years as our photography and tourism work load has boomed is taking a step back from my volume of blogging. I have such a backlog of trips I want to share—Arizona! Portland! more Iceland ! more Namibia —and I’m really hoping the bandwidth presents itself in the future. Blog posts take 10 times the amount of time they did when I started this space in 2007, and a lot of the time I do have to put into this blog is spent updating some of my most popular older posts to make sure that the information is always accurate for the people using it to plan their trips.
I’m also trying to find a better flow this year of adding new content and not breaking my back while doing it and also implementing more affiliates to trips I’ve taken so they’re easily bookable (and also to help cover the cost of running this blog, which is not cheap!). I’ve found small hacks like voice-texting my posts over Bluetooth while I’m driving and in a clear headspace or typing them out in my phone notepad before I go to bed at night and then emailing them to myself has helped somewhat. And due to substantial rising costs of the software we use (ahem, Mailchimp), I’ll be transitioning the RSS feedback newsletter to a new platform next week. I hope you’ll stick with me as I iron out the kinks!
2023 in tourism work
We had a lot of fun tourism projects this year, a few in Alabama , one in Kentucky and the majority in Tennessee. We worked with our friends in Bell Buckle to capture all their annual events, and I even got to be their spokesperson on a regional commercial. Apologies to all the people who may have visited the Chamber website only to be greeted with this
