I'm going To Be Mark Twain For Halloween...

... And a Travel Writer when I grow up

Gaining accurate information for this trip through Central America has been a huge chore. Hours a day can literally be wasted away looking for the best language immersion school that accepts pets.

Frommer's.com has become a good source for tapping into the energy current of traveller's and travel writers. Frommer's came through once again when I stumbled across the 5th installment of the latest series,"How to be a travel writer" by Robert Haru Fisher.

In this 5th installment Fisher dishes on the dirt and diamond rewards of freelance travel writing. Of particular interest are Fisher's highlights on Mark Twain's freelance career whom he proclaims quite accurately, "First Amongst Freelancers."

To prove his point, Fisher shares this charmer. A quote that strikes a chord with the beauty of truly great travel writing.

-Mark Twain, quoted during a dinner, "held in honor of a baseball team about to embark for Hawaii on a world tour (sponsored by Albert Spalding of baseball bat fame)...in 1889."

"No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one,
no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and
waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me,
but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy
airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its
surf beat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its
plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands
above the cloud rack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can
hear the plash of its brook, in my nostril still lives the breath of flowers
that perished 20 years ago."

Ahh, delicious! For more on this series, check it out at the Frommer's site. http://www.frommers.com/rss/articles/5023.html

Photo borrowed from The Official Website of Mark Twain.