- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 17
-
Sparkle (0)
Bossy describes her second road trip across America as being similar to childbirth. It's incredibly painful in the moment, but the outcome is so amazing and wonderful that it gives you a touch of amnesia which is necessary because there's a desire to do it over and over and over again.
Welcome to six weeks of meeting the people who live in your comment section face-to-face.
This is the second time I Am Bossy has hit the road for blog-driven travels. The first time was in 2008, when Bossy's Excellent Road Trip crisscrossed the country, meeting more than 250 bloggers across 182 cities in 42 states.
Two years later, she's on the road again, this time to meet 500 bloggers in more than 200 cities, and the number continuously rises as new people hear about the road trip and join along.
How does she hit so many places in six weeks? By waking up each morning at 4:30 a.m. and hitting the road by 4:45. She drives on average seven hours a day before pulling into the new destination, finding an Internet cafe to pound out a few emails and upload a blog post, then continuing to the home of the blogger she's staying with that night -- there are a few stops that involve hotels, but for the most part, Bossy is staying with people who offered to put her up.
After they rest for a moment, they head out to the nightly meet-up. After the meet-up, she collapses for a few hours of sleep before she wakes up and does it all over again.
For six straight weeks.
Hence that analogy to the painful part of childbirth.
While bloggers often meet each other face-to-face at conferences such as BlogHer, Bossy says there is something special about meeting groups of bloggers who live in the same area. While they may enter the evening not knowing anyone else who will be there, they leave with a newly found network of local bloggers.
As Kitty Joe told Bossy in the New York meet-up, she came thinking it would be strange to spend the evening socializing with strangers, but found herself in a situation where it felt like she was spending the evening with a room of old friends. The common bond of blogging gave all the participants a built-in conversation topic to use as a base and expand into other areas of interest and commonality.
It's not just the other bloggers who find the meet-ups a bit nerve-wracking. Bossy herself admits that while they're all exciting in theory, there's also trepidation about meeting up with a bunch of people you don't know.
"It's easy to stay in our comfort zone and get swallowed by our own routine. This is a six-week period out of my comfort zone, and I'm asking everyone else to meet me halfway," she says.
Mom-101, who attended the New York meet-up, says, "Some of my best friends are bloggers. When it comes down to it, I'm a pretty social person. I have the hermit writer gene in me, but I also need to have real friends that I can hug and kick under the table and spill my drinks on. There are amazing bonds that can happen online, but there's no substitute for looking someone in the eye."
Magpie Musings, who was also at the New York meet-up, admits, "It's nice to put a face to the words - a human person writes them, so it's interesting to see who the human really is. Some people are just as you'd expect, some not at all. I don't think meeting other bloggers has changed the way I write, but it does affect how I respond in comments -- once you've crossed that bridge from anonymous pixels to actual flesh, you've achieved a different connection."
What do you think?
Melissa writes Stirrup Queens and Lost and Found. Her book is Navigating the Land of If.
