Silver Springs, Florida – photo by Moragh Carter
Hello and welcome to Moragh’s Travel Blog.
This blog is a record of some of the many adventures that I’ve had during my solo trips to the United States of America. These trips were taken over a period of ten years, from 2007-2016.
Something different
Many travel blogs seem to be about either younger people going on adventure holidays or seniors going on cruises or packaged holidays. My trips, as a senior citizen travelling alone, don’t fit either of those categories, so I hope you enjoy reading about something a bit different.
While some of the people I’ve written about I’ve visited many times, others I’ve only met once, or maybe twice. I generally travel off the tourist trail and this has led to some unusual experiences along the way, often very different to the kind that most tourists have.
I’ve met people from all walks of life. Some are comfortably off and doing well in life, some are well known celebrities. But I’ve also met many ordinary folk who are struggling with life. Some are just poor, finding it hard to make ends meet each week and living very much from hand to mouth. Others are coping with addiction to drugs or alcohol, either themselves or having friends and relatives with these problems. Some have been in and out of jail, often for failure to keep up with child support payments, though some because of their addictions. I have even visited people in jail and sat in on court cases. Through all these experiences I have seen a side of America that few tourists see.
Mad, brave or foolhardy, so I was told
Many of my friends in the UK thought that I was either mad, brave or foolhardy to travel solo to places I’d had never been to before, and to be meeting people who I only knew via e-mail. After all, the only people I already knew in the States were my sister, who lives in Massachusetts, and my cousin, who lives in Texas. However, prior that first solo trip in 2007, I had compiled a list of eighteen e-mail friends to try and meet … and, amazingly, I met every single one of them. Some have become firm friends.
Future Plans
Ever since I returned from that trip, a friend has been nagging me to write a book about my travels. So many trips later, I am finally doing something about it. I puzzled for a long time about the best way to tackle this task, and I’ve finally settled on the idea of writing about the many adventures I’ve had as a series of short stories. I will also tell you about how I came to meet some of those people that I’ve got to know.
Although I think that the book title, ‘Moragh’s Travel Adventures’, might not be the most imaginative choice of title, I reckon I have got plenty of time to come up with something better before I have written enough stories to publish in a book … or more. Maybe, as you read these stories, you can come up with a better title for the book.
Do feel free to comment
I hope you will enjoy sharing my journeys with me as you read these stories. Any comments or questions you have on any of them may well trigger memories of more incidents that I could write about, so please feel free to add your comments.