To blog, or not to blog while traveling

When I’m out traveling I do my best to keep my blog updated, because that’s the whole point of travel blogging isn’t it? Personally I think the travel blog posts written by bloggers on the move are the most interesting to read, because it captures what the blogger is experiencing in that very moment, instead of the attempts to reconstruct what happened months (and sometimes years) after.

Memories seem to fade with time and so does the excitement of the experience. Sometimes, I can’t help feeling that I’m reading a piece of homework about “My Summer Holiday,” instead of what should have been a captivating narrative. I can’t help feeling that the blogging has turned into a duty instead of a passion.

Of course there’s a trade off, and one could argue that it’s more important that the blogger go out and experience things and get some value for those hard-earned travel bucks, instead of wasting time in front of the computer. Besides, I know my writing sucks, when I’m under time pressure, but that doesn’t keep me from trying to jot down at least one post a day, when I’m away.

A short post (less than 300 words), in which I describe what I’ve been doing or share a funny experience, takes less than an hour to write, and I’ll typically write it late at night or early in the morning, i.e. at times, when I would otherwise just be doing nothing. I save the heavier posts and posts requiring more research, until I’m back home, and I have the time and wi-fi to do it properly.

Unfortunately, I have the attention span of a 5-year-old, so I sometimes forget about those awesome, blog-about-it-later places I’ve visited. That was the case of Ivan Ramen in New York, which I’ve been to twice, and which I intended to blog about each time. Never happened until more than one year later. Tender Bar in Tokyo was about to suffer the same fate, but I managed to put something together before the 1-year deadline.

Right now I’m going through photos from last year’s trip to New York, and I realize that I still have about 20 New York blog posts in the pipeline. With a New York trip coming up soon, I’d better get started. So brace yourself, New York blog posts coming up!