So, we are off again! Heading to St. Louis. We’ll be driving up and spending about a week there. We’ve had a temporary lineup change just to keep things interesting. Scarab will not be along for this trip. Instead, because of a special invite from Brooke, I’m going to do some traveling, writing, and posting with her.
I’m very pleased to have Brooke as a traveling partner for the next month. She is witty, intuitive, and insightful. Plus, I thought that Twitter Travels could use a female touch. Yes, just like Twitter Travels is going to have guest posters, we’re also going to have guest travelers. Scarab will be re-joining me in about a month.
We’ve already got meetings set up with Tojosan, Zach Flauaus, and PreppyDude. If you are in the St. Louis area, please let me know so we can catch a meal or a drink!
While on the road in Southern California, we were met with some major challenges. The primary one being a lack of proper funding and mobile-computer equipment. We took a chance and flew out to Los Angeles and found ourselves lost and scrambling.
We met some great people and learned some hard lessons while in LA. Our biggest challenge was that we didn’t post enough. We take full responsibility for that. We were ill-prepared for the harsh realities of a big city. We didn’t have a car, we didn’t have money for food, and we didn’t have a solid plan.
People who we thought were friends and could count on, didn’t follow through. We were told by the person who helped us to arrange for a one-way airline ticket, that she would be able to get us a car from a manufacturer. This never happened. We found ourselves stuck in Los Angeles. In LA, you have to have a car. We regret not being able to accomplish what we set out to do. We relied too much on too many things outside of our control. We definitely made some mistakes.
Luckily, people who we hardly knew on Twitter stepped up to help us out. We were overwhelmed by the unexpected support we received from @christyxcore, @markdavidson, @thevixy, and @MONEKE. We also got to meet a lot of people from Twitter at @gregbarnett’s TweetupLA.
Other people who we thought were helping us, ultimately ended up hurting us. At some point we will address what happened but for now, we are taking our experiences as a lesson learned and moving on. We’ve made commitments that we need to keep and we intend on forging along with a new found wisdom that could have only come from our experience in LA. In order for Twitter Travels to keep up our end of the bargain, we have to have equipment, a working budget, and consistent funding. We need to post every day. We need to be who we are and to do, what we do.
Brooke will add a new element to Twitter Travels and in the future, we’d like to have even more travel partners. Twitter Travels is a community-based project. Our mission is to connect the Twitter world with the real world. Our ultimate goal is to work our way back out to California because we loved it there but the reality is, Los Angeles is not a city to be in without a car or funding. This is the harsh reality we learned. The dollar sure does stretch a lot farther in the South and Mid West than it does in other parts of the country!
Moving forward with our project, we need to start raising more funds immediately. Brooke and I will be gathering some of the money through sponsorship but we really do need the community’s help again with donations. Donate if you can; even the smallest amount is appreciated. You can use the Chip-In widget to the side, or send money via PayPal directly to my email. As usual, if you can’t donate but want to help, please pass this on to friends. Blog about it. Retweet. Anything at all for more exposure.
Our next stop will be St. Louis. We need to raise around $1200 more to make this happen. We also have a new sponsor and I’ll include more details about that in a future post. For now though, we really need your support. If you have a company and you would like to sponsor our travels with used laptops, a previous generation iPhone or Treo, or even a small budget for promotion, please contact us. Thanks again to everyone for their support. We look forward to meeting you on the road!
P.S.
We’d like to make it out to Las Vegas, Arizona, and eventually back to California by September. We’ll do a better job of keeping everyone up to date as we continue to move forward.
July 27th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Hey, want my iPhone I’ll have to replace soon? Yes, cracked screen, but dammit it still works and is better than nothing! I’d have no use for it after replacing it so if you’d want it as a freebie let me know.