Sharing Travel Experiences

Galavanting with Kim Mance

by Andy Hayes

Kim Mance is editor and co-creator of the online women’s travel magazine, Galavanting. She’s also founder of Travel Blog Exchange, a community of new media travel writers. While on her travels, she also writes for MarieClaire.com’s Travel Diaries, The Huffington Post, and other places around the web.

Kim looking slightly daunted at a glass-blowing lesson in Otaru, Japan.

Could you introduce yourself?

I’m a mom with a blended family of five kids…which means when I go out in public I hear one of two things: When I’m not with any of the kids, people calling me “miss” say things like, “Oh just wait until you have kids, then you’ll (insert pearl of wisdom…). If I’ve got all the kids with me I undoubtedly hear the phrase, “You sure have your hands full”, in intervals no longer than about five minutes apart. But beyond that I’m a new media-loving, adventure-seeking woman who wishes I had more time to paint (so I could perhaps develop some talent).

Go Galavanting, the travel website you founded, is a popular one. What does “galavanting” mean to you?

The word “galavanting” to me means going out in search of fun and adventure. It also means doing it your own way. My idea of travel is learning and letting the world teach me things rather than forcing my ideas on the world. I usually ditch the big tour companies and take a 4×4 rental jeep through rough backroad terrain with a few friends, or sit for an hour and learn from an eccentric Parisian chocolatier, or volunteer local schoolhouse for a morning of my trip. Travel is what one makes it — not only what some guidebook says to do — and that’s why we call it “galavanting”.

Andy’s Note:  Galavanting.  I like it.

Any tips for us about your hometown of Chicago?

Sure, I haven’t lived here long (and am originally a Colorado native), but there are so many fantastic places to see in Chicago. Just walking around downtown and the Magnificent Mile gives visitors a really great sense of the vibrant energy here. And there is always a festival, concert or something going on at Millennium Park. Top of the list for a funky and different experience would be the Green Mill Tavern on a Thursday night where a locally-famous big band plays each week, re-creating a 40s radio show. Another cool thing to do is an architecture river cruise, since Chicago is really one of the most architecturally unique cities in the US.

Andy’s Note:  I’d also add my favourite Chicago tip is to bike/run/walk along the Lake Michigan shore.  Head north from downtown and the trail hugs the waterline for miles – it’s crowded but fun, with beaches, picnic stops, and great views.

You’ve visited 27 countries so far. Which one did you find the most inspirational and why?

I think one of the most poignant travel moments I’ve ever experienced was during my first trip abroad. I was fourteen and had convinced my parents to let me join a church group going to northern Malaysia, to volunteer at orphanages and elderly homes. I was supposed to be telling people about religion along the way, to save them from being “lost”. But I was far too fascinated by learning from the people I met and the truths they were experiencing on a daily basis, which were very different from my own. I was enchanted by a jovial shopkeeper’s shrine to Buddha, with its lovely meal laid out for the statue and incense wafting into the air. We communicated through a mix of English tidbits and arm-waving for about an hour. I learned about his family, his shop, and his life. He didn’t seem lost to me. In fact though things there were so spectacularly different, they were also peculiarly similar to my home life on a human level. To that point in my life, I’d always believed that dinner plates were ceramic — but it turned out dinner plates were also made from banana leaves. My young mind was left spinning with curiosity about the rest of the world, and on the plane ride home I was already planning my next trip. I’ve long since left religion altogether, but the experience of my eyes being so vividly opened by travel will stay with me forever.

Not Kim’s Buddha sighting…but you get the idea.

What’s coming up on your travel to-do-list?

Next up is actually the first-ever Twitter Press Trip put on by Princess Cruises. They invited us Galavanting Gals to check out the Western Caribbean route which will take us to Grand Cayman, Honduras, Mexico and the Bahamas. I haven’t been on a cruise since I was a kid, so it will be a new experience, and we’ve line up some pretty great shore excursions. I’ll also be finding a few good anti-nausea medicines and reviewing them each for Galavanting (wish me luck!). Next, we’ll be taking the Galavanting cameras and crew to the Colorado Rockies for ice climbing, back bowl snowboarding, and to follow the Breckenridge mountain ski patrol on their avalanche-prevention efforts. After that we’ve got some great stuff planned for 2010, most of it from my own travel bucket list.

Andy’s Note:  Absolutely gutted as I was also invited for the Twitter cruise but I’ll be missing out!  Please let us know how it goes!

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Thanks Kim for all these insights. I love your first trip abroad story. Absolutely brilliant – that’s exactly what travel more is about.

To know more about Kim, be sure to go check out her website, Go Galavanting and follow her on Twitter, @KimMance.

Photos by Kim Mance except for Buddha photo by Koshyk

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