It seemed like an overly ambitious and vaguely absurd idea to take my eight-year-old son on a week’s ski vacation to Colorado. After all, he’d only skied five days in his life and that was on low-lying rolling hills, not mountains. Since it was just the two of us going to Colorado and I wouldn’t be able to leave him alone, I imagined spending the entire week on the bunny hill while I gazed way up at the sky-piercing powdery peaks with longing.

But this is something I learned that week: when it comes to skiing, kids are weirdly fearless. Sure, my child, as it turned out, isn’t brave about making small talk with friendly seat-mates on chairlifts—my chatting with strangers seemed to cause him so much embarrassment he’d freeze solid, staring ahead as if he didn’t know me—but the skiing part he tackled like a Swiss downhill racer on speed. No anxiety at all. I supposed this lack of fear in kids has something to do with them being closer to the ground than adults. But more than that, I believe it’s sheer naivety. They don’t know they could tear a ligament, or slip off an overhang unnoticed, or lose a whole finger. They don’t know they could be trapped in a snow bank until the spring thaw melts them into floppy carcasses. They haven’t lived long enough to figure these things out.  

After the first half-hour on the bunny hill beside One Ski Hill Place in Breckenridge—the resort having the advantage that you can simply walk outside and step onto a chairlift—Quinn announced he was ready for the high mountains. “But this is the best bunny hill I’ve ever been on!” I told him. I was enjoying being ferried up the slow-moving sidewalks to the top of the hill and working on my turns going down. So what if I was surrounded by pre-schoolers. It was a blast. “Mummy, this is boring!” he pleaded.

 I grudgingly agreed we’d try one of the mountains, but seeing how high they were, I worried that once we made it to the top, he’d be too afraid to come down. “It’s a long way up there, might take an hour,” I told him, “and the mountains are full of five-foot moguls.”

 “Awesome!” he squealed, punching his fist in the air.

 The first chairlift we rode took in sweeping views of Breckenridge’s myriad ski runs, endless long white ribbons cut into forests of the deepest green. Below, we watched jovial families skiing in multi-coloured ski garb calling out to meet at one restaurant or another; Argentinean sixty-somethings racing with helmet-cams; and snowboarders practicing their Shaun White jumps on special snowboarding ramps. Finally, we neared the top. “OK, we’ll be de-chairing soon,” I said, apprehension in my voice. Giggling at my airplane joke, he flipped up the bar as if this were a kiddie amusement ride, and proceeded to hop from the lift down to the ground.

“How did you know how to do that?” I asked, bewildered, as if someone must have kidnapped him in the night to show him what I remember being a terrifying ordeal when I learned to ski as a teenager.

“I watched the people in front of us,” he shrugged.

“Oh,” I said. But he didn’t hear me. He was skiing toward the nearest mountain edge along with the crowd. “There’s a green run over there,” I shouted out after him, meaning the colour-coding system to classify how difficult the slope is—green being easy; blue being not so bad; and black being yo is dead!

He obliged to take an easy green, one called Snowflake, but complained the whole way down that it felt more like cross-country skiing, a lot of hard work. Clearly, at 55 pounds, he was too light for Snowflake. On the next run, and the rest of that day and the next, we skied down blues together and I thought we’d hit our stride, our comfort zone for the rest of our skiing lives together contained in the colour blue. On those blue runs of Breckenridge, especially on the back bowls, I felt an exhilaration I hadn’t felt skiing in years, laughing nonstop with Quinn as we glided from one valley to the next, often having an entire blinding-white paradise of a mountainside in the sun all to ourselves.

But on the third day, some snotty-nosed ski brat standing behind us in a lift line bragged to his friends about having just gone up the Imperial Lift, the highest chairlift in North America. Quinn wanted to try it too. “But we like the blues!” I said. 

It was futile. His face was too excited for me to refuse. Soon, we found ourselves at the highest elevation we’d been yet, and about to ascend further up a t-bar tow with a warning sign that read, “Experts Only Beyond This Point”. We went up anyway. We could always walk down if we had to, I reasoned, swallowing my panic. Next we rode the Imperial Lift itself, which catapulted us above the tree-line into an Arctic climate, an entirely different weather system than down below. Down below, we’d barely needed our jackets in the sun. Down below, people were drinking beer in t-shirts on outdoor patios, getting tanned. Up there, wind whipped our faces raw as we stepped off the lift. We spotted an elevation sign: 12, 840 feet. I was surprised we didn’t have altitude sickness.

I gazed around the mountaintop. It felt the way Everest must feel, a low persistent howling, thin crisp air, frozen dead bodies scattered around. I realized the only way down was a double-black diamond run. Not single black, but double black. “Let’s go!” shouted Quinn. He took off like a baby snow leopard chasing a tumbling rock. I watched in horror, the way one does when her offspring disappears down a cliff, but then, realizing he was skiing just fine, I ignored him to confront the sheer icy descent on my own. Criss-crossing the entire mountainside in dozens of near-horizontal back-and-forth lines, it took me half an hour just to get down to the Imperial Lift. Unlike my son, I understand about comas. Quinn, who’d been patiently waiting for me, wanted to go again.

It was getting late, so I talked him into going back to the bottom and drinking peppermint hot chocolate instead, and maybe later, going bowling at the lodge’s mineshaft-themed bowling alley. His face lit up and he agreed. He may be an expert skier, but he is, after all, still a kid.

Laurie Gough


*Note--This story was slated for the Toronto Star but the editor just told me his freelance budget was slashed and he couldn't publish stories he'd agreed to after all (not his fault; it's just the general state of things these days with the decline of print media).  So I thought I'd stick it on my blog instead. Quinn is a bit older now and once he gets off his crutches, will start skiing again. (I'm actually not joking!)

First Day of Cruise to Antarctica, Jan 9, 2013
We've left the heat and chaos of Valparaiso and are sailing south down the coast of Chile for Patagonia, then Antarctica, both places I've wanted to visit since I heard their names as a kid. I can’t believe the cruise line invited me to do this for free. I just have to figure out what to write about.

Hour Later
OK, now that I've had a look around this behemoth of a 1250-passenger ship, I wonder if I’ll actually meet anyone onboard. I don’t exactly fit in. It’s not that the passengers are on average 30 years older than I am—that’s totally fine—I just feel we might not have much in common judging by conversations I’ve overheard. Also, I can see I’m going to have to be super vigilant. I just took a tour of the dining room with its sprawling buffet and WHOA! At the end of the three weeks I’ll be waddling down the passageways to my stateroom loaded with armfuls of pistachio custards, chocolate mousses and sundried tomato pizza from the all-you-can-eat buffet. 

Will eat lots of fruit and big salads!
Will go to the gym and run on treadmill every day!
Will still be able to wear the same jeans I’m wearing now when I leave!
Will! Will!

Hour Later:
Just got back from buffet (didn’t exactly follow vigilance regime but it’s the first day so lenient) and am thinking of how I’ve never thought of myself as a cruise-type person. The very thought of cruises has always vaguely horrified me. I’ve often wondered what could be more stifling than being trapped at sea in a gas-guzzling vessel with hefty cruisers making their way from the casino to the ice cream to the disco while discussing the virtues of the NRA. I’ve actually just seen some of these people in the dining room. Their conversations didn’t run that deep though, more along the lines of how they’re going to miss their pets and where they keep their pets when they go on cruises and how they came to name their pets. Oh, and I saw a woman roughly the same size as a storage shed. It scared me so much I fled right past the dessert counter without a second glance.

Next Day
My toothache has come back. I can’t eat or drink anything hot or cold and am taking ibuprofen around the clock. The dentist I went to while visiting Guelph at Christmas told me there was nothing wrong, which was such a relief that the pain actually seemed to subside. Must have been psychosomatic. I’m in agony! And look where I am, surrounded by the sloshing southern sea headed for Antarctica.

I think I need a root canal.

Frank’s One Regret In Life
I just had breakfast with a sweet man named Frank. He’s 93, uses a cane, and can’t stand Republicans. He also knows a lot about the Canadian health care system and was an engineer in Baltimore. His wife died ten years ago and he goes on cruises alone all over the world. He told me his life has been rich and memorable. Then he looked out at the ocean and said, “Never had a blow job though. My one regret.” After choking on my watermelon, I tried to cobble together the appropriate response although, to be honest, wasn’t sure what that was. “Well, um, maybe it wasn’t so common in your era. Except for, I don’t know, Marilyn Monroe?” He didn’t seem convinced, so I added, “But anyway, your life isn’t over yet. There’s still time.” He seemed to consider this and I took a sip of tea, forgetting how a single drop of hot liquid shoots flares of pain through my cranium. It was actually good timing to rush off to take an advil. The conversation had turned rather awkward.

Ice Cream People
Just saw a large pack of extra-large people pouring out of an elevator, all with giant ice cream cones in hand. Found it rather alarming. On the other hand, there’s that poem written by the woman octogenarian who wished she’d eaten more ice cream in her life, gone barefoot more, etc. But surely she was talking about the occasional ice cream, not four triple cones a day. These people are certainly living it up. Out on the Lido Deck they’re exposing great mounds of flesh to the ozone-less southern sun while sipping dozens of pink social drinks all day.

I love escaping into my small cozy room. Everything is miniature—tiny bed with the softest pillow-top mattress, comfy sofa, even a cute TV which runs repeats of the onboard lectures, CNN, and a movie channel. I’ve noticed the people who work on the ship all seem to be from Indonesia and the Philippines, probably because they’re hired cheaply. They work so hard. These two Indonesian guys keep wanting to clean my room, twice a day! I keep saying not to bother, it’s not dirty, just give me the little chocolates and skip the cleaning. They seem happy I’m not high maintenance. 

We Speak English in Texas
Just got back from a Spanish lesson where the woman next to me was completely perplexed when I told her I live in an English-speaking part of the province of Quebec. “There’s a non-English speaking part? What language do they speak? We speak English in Texas.”

I’m going outside. Not only is the air fresh and invigorating but the IQs are higher. And the people aren't nearly as fat out there. Yesterday morning when I opened my curtains I was taken aback to see streams of passengers purposefully striding down the deck with their arms swinging. Turns out they’re doing it for exercise and refreshment. What a concept! One rotation is a quarter mile. I joined them and went around about 15 times. I think I’ll just keep going round and round for the rest of the cruise. Not only is it enlivening to be in touch with the natural beauty of the earth, feel the wind on my face and breathe in the sea air, I also get to eavesdrop on the eccentric British birdwatchers and intelligent naturalists who spend the day at the back of the ship with their binoculars. It’s a whole other culture out there!

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Travel writers often neglect to write about their own back yards, the places they've chosen to live (and believe me, finding the ideal place to live in this world isn't easy. That's one of the themes of my last book, Kiss the Sunset Pig.)  I realized I was guilty of not writing about where I live recently when I noticed a Reader's Digest contest called Canada's Most Interesting Towns. In 300 words we're supposed to write about what makes our towns cool. I live in a little English-speaking village on a big river in Quebec, 25 minutes north of Ottawa. If I had one word to sum up Wakefield, it would be eccentric, which is why I love it. But other than my writing about it locally--usually letters about all its scary environmental issues--I'd never written much about it before. These are my 300 words below that I entered in the contest (in the "most community spirit" category).
My entry is here and you can even vote for me if you like, which would be fantastic! Or maybe you'd like to write about your own city, town, or rural haven. Writing about where you live makes you think about why you're there.

Village of 1000 Bursting with Community Spirit          

Everyone lines along on the river bank waiting for it to appear. Since it’s July 1, the sun is blinding as we gaze over the shimmering water, and making out a ramshackle pirate ship in the distance isn’t easy. But then some kid always shouts, “There it is!” and everyone squints harder. The kid is right. The Wakefield Raft, constructed new and more creatively every year by the village teens, is sailing down the Gatineau River toward us, just as the Canada Day Parade behind us is starting. Already we hear drumming and singing from the floats, and look, there’s the Village Poet leading the parade on his bike, adorned as usual with a tea cozy on his head. The Wakefield Granny float is next, filled with a dozen laughing grandmothers who started an international movement to support grandmothers in Africa. For years, the Wakefield Grannies have been enlightening Wakefielders on the plight of elderly African women who’ve lost their children to AIDS and now raising their grandchildren. The annual Granny Concert on Wakefield’s covered bridge, featuring jumping dancers from Burundi and 60-voice choirs, is just one of many Wakefield fundraisers to help African grandmothers buy food for their families. These Wakefield Grannies are feisty. They once posed in the Wakefield Nude Calendar, another fundraiser where notable townsfolk and the village’s most colourful eccentrics strip down to support the Wakefield Emergency Fund. And in the parade, here comes the SOS float where they’re shouting, “Save our Spring!” They’ve been trying to protect the town’s source of spring water and their marches, mock funerals, and benefits are wildly popular, almost as much as the Save Our River rallies to stop a septic sludge plant from polluting the river. Wakefielders won that fight. The Gatineau River is saved. And, right now, those teenagers from their pirate ship are plunging from the top deck straight into its chilly blue depths. We all cheer for the kids, for the river, for Wakefield.

World Travels and Travel Writing: Where Two Passions Merge, by Laurie Gough

Have you always wanted to write about your travels but don’t know how to begin? The idea of travel writing may seem daunting, but in many ways, it’s much easier than writing           fiction.

Unlike fiction, where the story and characters all have to come out of your head, when you’re traveling, so many elements of your story are already there: the setting, the characters, even the plot. Finding the ‘plot’ or the story can be tricky. Sometimes you don’t find it until you’re back home when you begin to reflect on your journey and come to see it more clearly.  

I find that my two passions, traveling and writing, feed off and enrich each other. How? When’re you’re on the road, everything around you takes on a vibrancy you may not have experienced since childhood. When you’re in a new place, you absorb fresh life around every corner, you see everything from a crooked angle. Time stretches out and your senses sharpen. In other words, you’re paying attention. And paying attention is a travel writer’s job. If you intend to write about your travels, you’ll be even more aware of the details of the moment. You’ll look more closely, listen more clearly, taste more carefully, and continually reflect on what you’re experiencing. As a result, your travels, and your writing, will be deeper and richer.

Here’s a little test: think back to what you did today. Can you remember any visual specifics of your day? It’s common to develop tunnel vision—jostling through the world without really seeing it. As a writer, you must fight this human default and constantly observe, note situations and details that evoke emotions and imagination.

A common mistake aspiring travel writers make is going on a trip and writing about it and assuming everyone will be interested in what you’ve written just because you’ve been to some place exotic. You have to assume the opposite: nobody is interested. It’s like showing someone your travel slides. Simply writing what you did each day of your trip is rarely interesting. You have to tell a story. 

What makes a good story? Sometimes you stumble upon a great adventure or have a chance encounter or a series of misadventures. But more often, the narrator—you—want something, some inner or outer quest you have in mind, something specific you’re seeking. You go through all kinds of hardship looking for it. Obstacles get in your way. In the end, you either get it or they don’t. Either is fine. Sometimes you discover what you thought you wanted wasn’t what you wanted at all, and like the Rolling Stones song, you may find something else in the end. You can’t know what it is beforehand, but you know it when you see it. Here again, traveling and writing go hand-in-hand—having a quest in mind not only makes for a good story, but for rich travels.

The quest can be external or internal of a combination of the two. When it’s internal, it’s something you’re looking for in yourself: to get over a death; to find inner strength after a car accident; to learn something new; to conquer a fear; to look for your younger more free-spirited self—which is the quest in my latest book. And that’s the amazing thing about traveling, it brings out so many parts within ourselves that we didn’t even know were there, or we’d forgotten about, or had never seen before in our lives.  These parts of ourselves aren’t normally called upon in our everyday lives in our daily routine. When we travel we come up against all kinds of hardships and mostly, we come up against ourselves and our own belief system. Everything gets shaken up when we travel. All this makes for good writing. It adds layers of depth to a travel story when there’s internal conflict and reflection going on.

How to set up your travel story? Think about the way you’d tell the story around a campfire, so people will hang off your every word. Engage your reader with every sentence. You can start in the middle of the action—the climax—and go backwards from there to fill in the background, or you can start chronologically. I was once drugged and hypnotized into buying carpets in Morocco. I chose to write this story chronologically, but I made sure to give a hint of the danger to come in the first paragraph. The number one reason a reader turns a page is to find out what happens next.

Lead the reader into the wonder and terror of the place you’re describing, remembering that your experience can only be conveyed through concrete details. Details bring your story to life. The more precise you can be in identifying and isolating the right details and the more fully you can evoke those particular details in the reader’s mind, the more powerful, compelling and effective your description will be.  

You can never squeeze all the details of a place into a description and you shouldn’t. You have to edit reality. You have to isolate the most telling details, asking yourself which ones most powerfully convey whatever it is about the scene that’s most relevant to your story, which details best establish the points you want to make.

Details add color to your story and bring it alive. Rather than saying, “We had fun that day,” show, don’t tell. This is the number one rule of writing. What made it fun? Give your readers something concrete.  “We built a big leaf pile full of crunchy brown leaves that smelled musty and we charged headfirst into that leaf pile over and over again for hours until we smelled just like the leaves ourselves.” 

Keep your senses open for the small things that evoke atmosphere—aromas of food cooking, oil burning lamps, pungent fruit, briny salt air, bird calls, fog horns, sirens, babies crying. Atmosphere is all around you; you just have to recognize it. Pepper your story with atmosphere, but don’t overdo it. 

Bring people into your writing whenever possible. How humans are acting on this planet never fails to enliven a story. Try to find some good in a place or situation, even if  it’s hard to see at the time. You don’t want your readers to be as exhausted as you were on that nightmarish bus ride through Sumatra. If you look hard enough, there’s always an upside to every journey (even if it sometimes feels as if the only upside on a disastrous trip is that it’ll make a great story some day.)  Often, it’s humor—the sheer absurdity of a situation—that saves you. The hefty woman squeezed next to you on the stifling train has just puked into the lap of her sari and now wants to borrow your purse…why? Most often, it’s the humanity of people that saves your trip, some small act of kindness when you need it most.

When you’re traveling, new sights spark thoughts that otherwise would never have entered your mind. Traveling generates whole constellations of ideas about how people live in this world, how they work and raise their kids, worship their gods, live and die, have fun in life. So when you write about a place, try to draw the best out of it, but also let it draw the best out of you.

Happy writing!

For years I’ve let other people’s opinions of the book
"Eat, Pray, Love" mar my perception of it. Without having read it, I believed my friends, fans, and fellow writers when they said the narrator was “spoiled” and “entitled” and I nodded eagerly when they said, “Isn’t it silly how Elizabeth Gilbert got to travel for a year staying in fancy hotels and eating at expensive restaurants all on the money from her book advance? Not exactly hard-core travel.”

These opinions from other people only fueled my already mixed feelings toward "Eat, Pray, Love" which, I realized at the time had something to do with jealousy and with life being unfair.

OK, I hated this book without ever having read it. I was an anti-Eat Pay Love-ite.

Back in 2006, my second travel memoir "Kiss the Sunset Pig" was coming out with Penguin Canada. I also wanted a US publisher so my agent sent it to Penguin USA. The reply from Penguin USA soon came. The editor really liked my book, saying it was “a hilarious, inspiring, exceptionally well-written personal odyssey, an original and fascinating quest.” But unfortunately, they couldn’t publish it. Why? Because that same year, Penguin USA was releasing another woman’s travel memoir that was similar, and although the writers “traveled in very different styles” the books were alike enough that they’d compete against each other, something publishers avoid. Also, the other writer was American, which would make it more saleable than a book written by someone Canadian and only a little bit American.

You can guess what that other book turned out to be. That’s right: “I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen.”  

Kidding! "Eat, Pray, Love" was released with Penguin USA in 2006.

Soon, you couldn’t go a day without Eat, Pray, Love raining down on you in some form. The book was an international best-selling mega sensation: Oprah, Eat-Pray-Love Vacation Tours, fan clubs, book clubs, t-shirts, a Julia Roberts movie. A Julie Roberts movie where the male lead was Javier Bardem! I realize this didn't mean that Elizabeth Gilbert herself would actually get to kiss Javier Bardem, but still, pretty close.

Meanwhile, Penguin Canada put about sixty dollars into publicizing my book.

So you can see why I had a slight resentment toward the book, especially when people told me how similar they thought our books were, or worse, they told me they liked mine much better. I didn’t want to hear that. Man, did I hate that book.

But then, last week, finally, after all this time, I read it. And as I read it, I found myself enjoying it. I found myself cheering Gilbert on through her difficult divorce and broken-hearted love affair, her escape to Italy to find the world’s best food. I was enthralled with her spiritual quest at the ashram in India. As for her finding a man in Bali, I was excited for her—and I’d once found a handsome man there myself and written about it. In short, I was thrilled for Gilbert’s hard-fought happiness at the book’s end.

I no longer resent Elizabeth Gilbert nor any of Eat, Pray, Love's success. As for the author being “spoiled” and “entitled” and “self-indulgent”, I find those criticisms unfair. Her book chronicles a year when she was trying to find another life for herself, one that truly reflected who she was. As several reviewers have pointed out, her book and both of mine really are similar—we just travel a little differently, as that editor had pointed out. We’re all entitled to tell our stories and if they’re well-written and true to who we are, they should be acclaimed. These are days of rushed multi-tasking and sound bites, when it’s easier to watch Netflix, or for kids to play video games, than to sit in a quiet corner and read a book. This means that every time a well-written book wins big, we all win. Every time an author becomes a millionaire, we should raise our glasses for the written word. Cheers, Eat, Pray, Love!

I so never thought I’d say that.

I'm giving a travel writing workshop at my place in Wakefield, Quebec. I give this workshop regularly at the San Miguel International Writers' Festival, among other places, but enjoy most giving it right at my own house.

Have You Always Wanted to Write About Your Travels but Don’t Know Where to Start?

Join Award-Winning Travel Book Author Laurie Gough in a full-day intensive workshop focusing on what makes a good travel story. You’ll learn that to be an effective travel writer you must lead the reader into the wonder of the place you’re describing, always remembering that your experience can only be conveyed through details. We’ll discuss ‘finding’ the story and how this isn’t something you can anticipate before leaving; travelling for a story as opposed to travelling for travel’s sake; how to craft your stories; how the ‘quest’ makes for a good travel story; the various types of travel writing; how to begin your stories to catch the reader’s (and an editor’s) attention. We’ll also discuss ways to get published in today’s rapidly changing market. 

*  Sunday, June 3rd, *10am-4 pm* at Laurie’s house in Wakefield (email for directions)
*  Includes Lunch and Snacks--including lots of dark chocolate to help with the
writing/creating process!   * $80 per person*

Lauded by Time magazine as “one of the new generation of intrepid female travel writers,” Laurie Gough is author of Kiss the Sunset Pig (Penguin), and Kite Strings of the Southern Cross: A Woman’s Travel Odyssey, shortlisted for the UK’s top literary travel book prize—the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award—and silver medal winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Travel Book of the Year in the US. Twenty of her stories have been anthologized in literary travel books, and besides being a contributor to The Globe and Mail, she has written for The L.A. Times, USA Today, salon.com, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun, Canadian Geographic, The Daily Express, Caribbean Travel + Life, among others. For more info and to register: laurie@lauriegough.com

I’ve been meaning to attach a blog to my website for years and I’m finally doing it!  My stumbling block has always been this: as a traveler and a travel writer, there are so many things to write about that I’m always overwhelmed with the possibilities. Should I write about the trips themselves? The writing about those trips?  Should I write about getting those stories published? My ideas for new books? Should I give tips on travel writing and pursuing travel writing as a career?  Should I discuss solo travel, backpacking, and my latest adventures with press trips?  And what about discussing what makes a good travel story? That’s my specialty. AHHHH!

OK, too much to write about. Forget the whole thing.

Just kidding! I will write about all those things.  And I will post stories from other travel writers, along with full versions of lots of stories I’ve written, and lots of advice. Basically, I’ll blog about…… the travel writing life.
My first post, below, is on mannequins of the world.
Thanks for reading!