This press release was published in part in several local newspapers including the (Northampton) Daily Hampshire Gazette and The Recorder in Greenfield:

Local Travel Editor Joins Historic Tourism Delegation to Iran

SOUTH DEERFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS -- The editor of a local travel website is part of an historic delegation visiting Iran this week to strengthen tourism ties between the U.S. and Iran. The delegation is part of a worldwide movement to promote peace through tourism.

Max Hartshorne, editor of GoNOMAD.com, based in South Deerfield, has joined with publisher Thomas Steinmetz of Hawaii-based eTurboNews and other tourism executives who have traveled to Iran to meet with representatives of both the public and private sectors of the Iranian tourism industry.  About 10 United States tourism professionals and a handful of journalists have made the trip.

The Iranian government has issued special diplomatic visas to the delegation through the U.S. embassy in Pakistan because there are no formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran. eTurboNews worked with Hamid Reza Talebi, a private tour operator in Tehran, to arrange the historic visit. Usually visas take many weeks and are difficult to obtain.

Hartshorne reports that despite the painted walls saying "Death to America," he has been greeted warmly everywhere he goes. Reflecting the high level at which this visit was viewed by Iran, the country's vice president Esfandyar Rahim Mashaee addressed the opening session in Tehran. "Can you say that someone is religious and pious if they promote violence? A small group is trying to paint a false picture of Islam" the Vice President told the gathering of more than 130 travel business executives and journalists. 

Hartshorne has been amazed at the contrast between the stereotype of the Iranian who hates America and the warm reality he experience during his visit.

"The most important thing about Iran is this daily encounter, repeated endlessly. You meet someone's eyes. They look at you, at your nametag. 'You are American?'"

"Yes you say. 'Great, great, welcome, welcome to Iran!' This steadfast enthusiasm for American people is what makes this country so wonderful, and this has made our trip so far a pleasure.

"I have a legion of concerned Iranians, working hard to find me a tour, to find me a hotel, to take care of me in every way. It's unlike anything I've seen in all of these years of overseas travel. A sparkling fun exhuberance to meet me and a genuine affection for America and Americans."

Hartshorne has been traveling the world for GoNOMAD.com since 2002. He said he was particularly impressed with the stone carvings at Persepolis and the She-it-kh Lutfullah mosque, the jewel of the lovely, leafy city of Esfahan, Iran's second largest city and main tourist center. "There are monuments and nature here that would blow away even a jaded traveler, " he said.

GoNOMAD.com is an alternative travel website with more than 250,000 unique visitors per month. You can follow Max Hartshorne's journeys in Iran on his daily blog, Readuponit.

We were delighted to see this excellent review of our website on another unique website, The Bachelor Guy. Here's what TBG had to say about GoNOMAD.com:

Go Nomad

Vacation time is rolling around, and you're looking for something a little more manly than the spa resorts featured in the brochures crammed into your mailbox.

You've been chained to your desk for weeks. Your tie feels like a shackle around your neck. You don't care about massages and 400 thread count sheets. You need the outdoors. You need adventure. You want to climb something. Play golf on the rim of a volcano. Anything but sit in a $400-a-night hotel room, watching SpectraVison, and "relaxing".

So where does a guy go to release his inner Magellan? GoNOMAD.com.

Specializing in alternative, or "active", travel, GoNOMAD.com has thousands of informative articles written by both professional travel writers and regular Joes – not paid PR reps and ad copywriters – who share their experiences and expertise out of the sheer joy of travel.

No idea where to go? GoNOMAD.com has tools to help you plan the perfect guy trip. Select the region and the activity, and get back a list of matching trips, along with pricing, duration, and trip highlights.

If you need me I'll be caving in Mexico.

Free www.GoNOMAD.com

Melissa Rayburn of the Associated Press wrote an intereresting article about GoNOMAD founder Lauren Axelrod and her son Josh which appeared on CNN.com.

Joshua Montgomery, left, learns to play a Balinese xylophone outside Ubud, Bali

How adventurous should your family vacation be?

Friday, June 23, 2006; Posted: 10:56 a.m. EDT (14:56 GMT)

AP) -- When Lauryn Axelrod plans a vacation with her teenage son Josh, she begins with one question: What new cultural and physical experiences do I want to give my child?

Sometimes the answer includes international travel. "We took Josh one year to the Yucatan on an organized learning vacation, kayaking in a beautiful biosphere with a Mayan storyteller," she says. Other trips involve a mellower type of adventure-seeking: On a recent road trip to Key West, Florida, mother and son meandered through small towns, chatting up locals and dining on regional delicacies.

"It's an attitude toward travel," says Axelrod, of Pawlet, Vermont, who founded the adventure travel Web site GoNOMAD.com. "You can go to the town next door and have an adventure if you approach it that way."

"Knowing your kids is important, and doing things that are age-appropriate," advises Axelrod. "You're not going to take a 3-year-old to go zipping across a rainforest canopy, whereas a 12-year-old will think that's the greatest thing."

Her son has recently been trying to decide which of his experiences to draw on in writing college application essays. Riding horses across the plains of Mongolia? Hiking through the Irish countryside exploring ancient castles? Visiting a war crimes museum in Vietnam and discovering how differently Vietnamese children are taught about the conflict with his country?

Whichever he chooses, his mother believes those real-world experiences he gained on vacation were priceless.

Kara Ashe included GoNOMAD on her list of recommended website in the Utne Reader, June 15, 2006

(reprinted from Dragonfire)

Summer is almost here, and that means vacation is right around the corner. Problem is, your annual trek to the beach has got you feeling bummed out, and amusement parks are starting to get a little mundane.

Looking for inspiration? Check out these sites for some out of the ordinary travel ideas.

GoNOMAD is all about helping tourists become travelers, embracing the unique cultures to be found off the beaten path. The site features articles by travelers, documenting their personal experiences in various countries, and their impressions of them. It also offers lodging recommendations meant to help travelers immerse themselves in the cultures of their host countries, including traditional sleeping arrangements. There is also information about alternative transportation options, like trains, boats and animal rides, as well as guided tours, and travel geared toward women and families.

The editorial staff at GoNOMAD was truly tickled to come upon this entry by Liz y Brian in her blog I Tend to Wander. It sums up our entire philosophy in just the kind of punchy prose that warms the cockles of our hearts.

Sunday, January 08, 2006
Go GoNomad: A Whirlwind Tour

Like somebody you'd like to go on a long trip with, the alternative-travel web site GoNOMAD at www.gonomad.com is both no-nonsense knowledgeable and packed with a giddy enthusiasm about the trip it's going to help you take. On top of that, this web site tells great stories.

More than just a vast clearinghouse of travel nuts and bolts (which it is) of flight price comparison calculators, huge vacation/cruise package lists, find-a-car/rent-a-car links, and hundreds of hostel sites, Go Nomad provides off-the-beaten track themes that run the inspiration gamut from French ethnobotanic culinary vactions and pink Brazilian river dolphin tending, to nude hiking and freighter hopping advice that make this site worthy of being a home base from which to launch even the most improbably foray.

Like a good traveling companion, it's tidy. Easily navigatable: even the Special Interest vacation search engine Booleans you through 14,000 vacation packages and 1300 top travel suppliers. You can imagine the editors and interns giggling manaically as they add yet another Bike Togo link or more guidance on riding Javanese ponies in Lesotho; whooping it up as they find ways to help you reserve beds on trains, barges, organic farms, castles, join wolf and grizzly bear safaris, or (way off the beaten track) build trails through Siberian taiga.

Like a unflagging travel companion, its very url eggs us on with its frolicing feature articles. "Go, nomad," it calls. Go! You can do it,' it says in David Rich's report from beyond-remote Kashmiri valleys full of strange and stunningly beauty on "knees past their 'use by' date" (Spiti Valley: The Middle of the Mystic Himalayas). Those stories and amazing photos call us to loll in the rose-scented bathtubs of Tuscan spas, storm the ramparts of thousand year old Syrian fortresses, and meander through Croatian Zinfandel vineyards.

Go Nomad!

posted by Liz y Brian @ 6:11 PM

Who is this talented wordsmith who is saying such nice things about us? She's a true nomad. Here's Liz's biography:

Liz Kirchner received a Master's degree in Botany and Agronomy from the University of Maryland, and dashed from the stage, gown flying, straight to the airport and off to Asia where she spent several years in Korea and China collecting data describing organic Asian home gardens and wild food gathering. That meant roaming the countryside buttonholing surprised Chinese peasants who were hoeing their peppers to ask them how things were going, or popping out from behind mossy oaks to interview Korean mushroom gatherers.

As much fun as that was, she made her way back to Washington D.C., a cultural cornucopia, where she continues to think and write about travel and food, wrapping them up together in a savory bundle like Korean barbecue in a lettuce leaf.

We're delighted to see that Jane Wooldridge of Knight-Ridder Newspapers counts our GoNOMAD.com newsletter among her favorites. This review appeared in numerous Knight-Ridder publications including:





Posted on Sun, Sep. 18, 2005

Some e-mail newsletters worth the clutter

Sure, they clog your mailbox. But e-mail newsletters also feed your wanderlust -- and help you ferret out deals that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Most travel e-mail newsletters are delivered weekly, though a few go out monthly. To sign up for them, just go to the company's Web site listed below; the e-mail signup feature is usually obvious. You can cancel your subscription at any time.

Here are a few faves:

GoNomad, www.gonomad.com: Delivered monthly, this letter delivers editorial articles about adventure travel. The site itself includes both articles and booking links, but the emphasis is on information.

WheretoGoNext, www.wheretogonext.com: Delivered every business day, this letter draws together press releases from the travel industry. Though oriented to the trade, if you're a travel junkie, you'll be interested in hot deals, new hotels and other newsy tidbits.

Farealert, www.farealert.net: Will zip you a note when there's an outrageously good fare available, such as $51 from Los Angeles to Fiji.

--Jane Wooldridge, Knight Ridder Newspapers

Here you’ll experience places and cultures through activities, interactions and tourism that involves doing instead of just seeing.

To help you plan such a trip, check out www.gonomad.com, which bills itself as being committed not just to alternative travel, but to participatory travel.

You’ll find a searchable database of unusual lodgings, events, tours, activities, and opportunities for working, studying and volunteering around the world, from weaving courses in Guatemala to staying with a family in Africa to helping a community in Nepal.

Even in places as familiar to many travelers as western Europe, GoNOMAD’s miniguides recommend unusual experiences like horseback riding tours of Ireland and a pilgrimage along El Camino de Santiago, in the Basque countryside.

There’s also a link to www.untours.com, a tour group that doesn’t have buses or guides taking you around by the hand but that can help you feel like a local by providing a fully furnished apartment and a customized itinerary.

Other recommendations from the Web site include a relatively affordable trip to Antarctica — $3,000 — and a trek to Bolivia to hunt down the legend of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who may have ended their days there (depending on which legend you believe).

GoNOMAD also also offers links to Web sites where you can obtain air tickets, visas, passports, travel insurance, rental cars, and lodging.

And while you can use it to explore exotic and unusual places, the Web site is edited and run from a small New England town — South Deerfield, Mass.

Affiliate newspapers that ran the story include:

The New York Times Travel Section, Sunday April 6, 2002.

Site to See: www.gonomad.com

"Promotes low impact, interactive, adventurous tourism. A resource for exotic destinations, volunteering, alternative transportation and tours. Articles, photos and sound clips. Some links are paid for by sponsors."

September 11, 2005
Alternative travel

For a different take on travel, browse www.GoNomad.com, a searchable database that rounds up untypical info and links. Subjects include lodging (with options including monasteries, farmsteads, boat hotels, rock caves), modes of transportation, destination mini-guides, and women's travel. The info is for various budgets. One article, for example, explained driveaways, the term for companies that match insured, responsible drivers with cars that need to be transported from one U.S. region to another. You basically agree to pay the gas, put down a deposit and arrive at the destination on time.

New Sunday Express

The New Sunday Express in Chennai, India, has more than 1,000,000 readers. On July 1, 2005, in a review of travel websites Colin Todhunter writes:

www.gonomad.com

"One of the best all round sites on the Internet. A US-based magazine, offering good, informative articles on global destinations, lodgings, getting there and organised tours. There are special sections on travel for women and for travelling with the family. This is a free-to-access site but, unlike most sites, actually offers payment for articles and ensures only quality pieces make it onto the site. GoNomad has a very guide-book feel in terms of offering specific information about destinations. It also offers information on alternative travel and encourages travellers to gain a deeper understanding of cultures and places by taking part in activities such as volunteering."

Business West March 15,2005
www.businesswest.com

On Sugarloaf Street in South Deerfield, there is a small, red-shingled building, in keeping with the area's quaint, New England architecture.

Inside, though, is a gateway to the rest of the world.

The building is the new home of GoNomad.com, an online travel resource for ëalternative travelers' — those in search of a thrill, an education, or a one-of-a-kind experience while traveling.

GoNomad.com's owner, Max Hartshorne, calls the site "a comprehensive resource center," designed to provide alternative travelers with both inspiration and information to plan virtually any trip.
The most prevalent aspect of the site is its editorial content — essentially a Web-based magazine, GoNomad features hundreds of articles describing unique trips that stray from the more common Disneyland, Vegas, or cruise ship vacations.

GoNomad includes travel guides, links to travel-based companies such as travel agents, airlines, tour companies, and volunteer organizations, and key information for alternative travelers, ranging from unique places to stay to the latest recommended immunizations, and how to find a bathroom — quick — in any country.

On any given day, GoNomad could feature a motorcycle tour of Bulgaria or the top 10 ëbare beaches' worldwide. It could also extol the benefits of teaching English in Paris, Tokyo, Spain, or Ghana, or of volunteering in the Himalayas.

But the site also offers details on an historical weekend in Richmond, Va., and of an English garden tour.

And as the business grows, so does its notoriety. GoNomad has been featured in a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and Hartshorne has served as a guest expert on travel and the state of the tourism industry for several media outlets including CNN, on which he appeared twice recently in the wake of the Asian tsunami that hit Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, and the once-booming vacation spot of Phu Ket, Thailand.

Having kick-started his business after the tourism industry, and in many ways the U.S. as a whole, suffered its most devastating blow in September, 2001, Hartshorne is indeed an expert on the fragility of the travel and tourism industry.

Yahoo Internet Life, April 2001:
New, notable and Fun-What's hot and cool on the web this month...

"If traditional sight-seeing makes you yawn, consider planning an alternative vacation that emphasizes "sustainable and responsible tourism." Suggestions here include learning Mayan weaving or volunteering in Nepal. Special tabs are devoted to solo female travel and adventurous families."

Orlando Sentinel, April 12, 2002
Websites to visit

Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA April 1. 2002.


"It's packed with articles, practical tips, links, and a searchable database of 1300 travel resources all geared toward people who want to see the world, but not as typical tourists.

National Geographic, February 2001:

Recommended websites for Ecotourism: GoNOMAD.com

"Gives information on alternative tourism projects and trips worldwide in both urban and non-urban destinations. Provides a small searchable directory of alternative tour operators, lodgings, learning and volunteer programs. Includes “how to” miniguides for the independent traveler. "

Answer: Alternative Travel is usually unique travel experiences that are departures from the "typical" beach, island, or mountain hotel or resort sightseeing trips. They can be anything from sustainable and responsible tourism projects such as building artificial island reefs, to enrolling in a foreign language or cooking course in Greece, to volunteering with children in Indonesia, to community development in parts of Mexico, to participating in an archaeological dig. Adventure Travel is a rapidly growing segment of the Travel and Tourism industry, and Adventure Travelers definitely seek something out of the ordinary. These types of trips can be incredibly educational and enriching, and can be fantastic ways to provide children, not to mention yourself, with personal, hands-on, real-world experiences which can't be found anywhere else.

The Recorder, Greenfield, Mass., Thursday March 21, 2002

Local Internet Travel Site Hopes
To Give Adventurers the World 

Deerfield man says service is for people who prefer ‘active travel'

By Arn Albertini
Recorder Staff

SOUTH DEERFIELD---A local man who has taken the helm of a World Wide Web site aimed at expanding the horizons of travelers.

The site, GoNOMAD.com, is a clearinghouse for travel information geared toward travelers who want to “get out of the comfort zone,” of travel, according to Max Hartshorne, the South Deerfield man who now runs the site. “As opposed to what most travel is, going to Disney World or lying down on a beach and winding down,” he said. “Alternative travel is involved travel. It is learning travel. It's active travel. It's making an effort to engage with the people who live in the countries” you visit.

Renting a motorcycle to cross the Himalayas, spending a week manning a lighthouse in Rhode Island or going to cooking school in Tuscany are among the trips the site chronicles.

Besides stories and information on how to go on these exotic trips, the site includes cultural tips, listings for tour companies, listings for small hotels and youth hostels and links to sites to purchase plane tickets and tour companies.

Eventually he hopes to add travel book reviews, a traveler's discussion board, video and sound clips and more local writers.

“Right now, I'm just trying to throw things up and let them stick,” Hartshorne said.

Hartshorne, 43, took over the site started by Lauryn Axelrod of Vermont on March 1. He most recently served as managing editor for Transitions Abroad, a travel magazine based in Amherst. His daughter, Kate will be as assistant editor for GoNOMAD.com.

For Hartshorne, the business combines all his life's interests: travel, his experience, advertising and the Internet. “It's my first foray into my own company. I am really excited.”

He hopes the site will help turn around the downward trend in travel after Sept. 11. In fact, he says, traveling again is important after the attacks.

“We've got to say to heck with these damn terrorists,” Hartshorne said. “We need to travel to share our cultures. Travel is the great equalizer. You see the depths of poverty and the depths of ignorance. We can't be isolated in this global economy.”

, Northampton, MA, April 1, 2002

Destinations off the Beaten track

By Judson Brown
Staff Writer

SOUTH DEERFIELD--Now may not seem like the best of times to be investing in an Internet site focused on adventurous travel to destinations off the beaten path.

But that has not deterred Max Hartshorne, a T-shirt and embroidered apparel salesman for a Holyoke, MA company, from purchasing GoNOMAD.com.

In fact, he thinks, as do some others, that the attacks awakened many Americans to their need to learn more about the world through travel.

A two-year old Web site started by Lauryn Axelrod, formerly operated from East Arlington VT, www.GoNOMAD.com is one of a growing number of "alternative" travel Web sites.

It's packed with articles, practical tips, links, and a searchable database of 1200 travel resources all geared toward people who want to see the world, but not as typical tourists.

These are people looking for rare, inexpensive, personally enriching, often adventurous and socially responsible travel experiences off the beaten path all over the world.

"At GoNOMAD, we define alternative travel as participatory travel, says a statement on the home page, "beyond passive sightseeing."

The participatory aspect of travel for some, as described in scores of articles archived on the site, involves organized educational experiences--like learning to cook in Mexico. For others, it may mean doing volunteer work as they go--teaching in Nepal, picking organic vegetables in New Zealand, doing dolphin research in Hawaii.

The site features "mini guides" to places such as Tasmania, Slovenia, and Zanzibar, and also unconventional approaches to travel, like a guide to home exchanges, for instance, and one on "travel as pilgrimage."

Hartshorne, 43, is a former newspaper reporter and editor who until recently was the managing editor of Transitions Abroad magazine in Amherst.

In additional to his affinity for the content and the mission of the site, he liked the numbers. A million hits and 61,000 unique visitors a month.

"That means the web site is seriously trafficked, and people are coming, so I won't just be waving a flag and nobody seeing it," he said. "It means you have a market, something people like."

And what about the world situation?

"Yeah, it's a scary world," says Hartshorne, "but I think that makes a lot of people more eager to travel."

If you see a mention of GoNOMAD while you are surfing the web or reading the paper, please send it to us. We will send you a reward!