A Contest for the Intern Spot at GoNOMAD.com

Interns are a great help to us at GoNOMAD. As we have joined our fellow businesses in seeing the fragility of the market, and the downward trend in business, we always can use people to help us out with tasks. There are now three UMass students who want to be interns. All are midway through college. Interns send out emails to get links and write articles for the site. They also write the Travel Reader blog, compiling the best travel stories from the web on a blog in our network.

So I decided to have a contest. I sent them a link to our writer's guidelines and told them to submit a travel article to us. And the best story would win the slot. We don't want to have any more than two interns each semester, and we have Isadora Dunne who's doing a great job and will be here til the summer. She just did a story about Yoga trips for GoNOMAD.

It's encouraging that people want to work with us, and are willing to compete for the spot.

We have promised to bring a TV next Tuesday, and provide Obama televised coverage at the cafe. So now I'm trying to figure out how to do it, since we put it up on the video display in the cafe. I'm hoping a website like Hula.com might be a way to broadcast over the web.

We are going to have an Obama-menu too.

Writing is All In the Family on GoNOMAD

It's been a criminally long time---two days without a single post. I actually did try to post on Monday but the photo I wanted to upload of Cindy in front of the MAMBO museum in Bologna refused to comply. She's just had her story about that fine city posted on the website. It's a well-crafted appreciation for a classical, traditional and very old city that most Italians love but most Americans can't find on a map of Italy.

I am proud that Cindy continues to write for us. She's joined by so many of my friends and relatives: My daughter Kate Cosme did a story about family travel in Old Orchard Beach (featuring photos of my adorable grandson Nathan), and Senior Travel Kent St. John's son wrote about Madrid for us just last month.

It's so much fun to have members of my family share their talents with well-written and informative articles for the website. I am working in the cafe again this afternoon, so won't get a chance to crank out my new political story about Colombia, but I hope to get a chance next week.

I'll be truly on vacation then, at our rented apartment on a farm in the village of Barga, in Tuscany, poolside with my laptop and my notebooks. I can't wait!